


Blueshift

by MurmuredLullabye



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Keith and Shiro are Adoptive Siblings, Kerberos!Lance, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 09:18:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12884796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MurmuredLullabye/pseuds/MurmuredLullabye
Summary: In 2083, Galaxy Garrison Cadet Lance Espinosa wins the internship spot on the Kerberos mission. Six months later, the mission is declared a failure due to pilot error, and he is mourned alongside the other members of the Kerberos crew.In 2084, Keith is just trying to pass his Mission Simulations class despite his less-than-cooperative teammates and his overbearing brother when the supposedly dead cadet crashes an alien escape pod into the desert, dragging Keith, Pidge, Hunk, and Shiro into a conflict much bigger than any of them could've imagined.





	1. Found

**Author's Note:**

> My very first Voltron fic and my first published fanfiction in a _long_ time. Hello, guys. I hope you enjoyed the first chapter. 
> 
> I currently do not have a beta; all mistakes are my own. Major kudos to [tyrellis](url) for cheering me on as I worked on drafting and plotting this out - I never would've posted this without her.
> 
> If you want to chat, I have a tumblr at [starry-lullaby](https://starry-lullaby.tumblr.com/), where I'll be posting Voltron stuff and probably some extras for this fic.

Keith had loved piloting from the moment he’d borrowed Shiro’s hoverbike and taken it out for a spin when he was thirteen - and yes, Shiro,  _ borrowed,  _ because he’d returned it afterwards, leaving only a couple scratches as evidence of his first time on the vehicle. That night, he’d sped through the empty streets of their sleepy suburb, and for a few hours he felt like he could fly so fast and so far that there was nothing that could drag him down ever again. When he was at the controls, sitting in the pilot’s seat, he was making the decisions instead of clenching his jaw and listening to what other people told him was best. The exhilaration of the adrenaline rush and that sense of control had brought him to follow Shiro into the Galaxy Garrison’s piloting program a year later, and at first he’d excelled. Keith did well enough in his academic classes without putting in much effort. Athleticism had always come naturally, and he impressed his instructors there, too. He fell deeper in love with the idea of flying and threw himself into the related coursework, earning a reputation as a natural pilot within the Garrison.

Then Keith began his fourth year, and with it, his Mission Simulations class - his first chance to fly under mission conditions instead of just practicing basic take-off and landing scenarios until the movements of his hands on the controls were distilled into muscle memory. At the beginning, he’d been eager, even excited; but it quickly became clear that this class put far more emphasis on trying to beat the Garrison cadets into some semblance of teamwork than actual flying, and everything had gone downhill from there. When Iverson had told them that their first full simulation would be a mock-up of a rescue for the failed Kerberos mission, two months into the semester, Keith couldn’t wait. Now that he was actually doing it, he desperately wished it had been pushed back another month, or that he’d had more luck with his assigned teammates.

“Hey, uh, Keith, do you think you could keep the turbulence down?” Hunk asked in a tone of voice that Keith had come to realize meant that his engineer was close to losing control of his incredibly weak stomach. 

Keith didn’t bother to hide his scowl; his teammates wouldn’t be able to see it anyway if they were actually doing their jobs and focusing on their stations - which Hunk wasn’t, according to the alert blinking on the far left side of the dashboard. “Not if you can’t pay attention long enough to fix the hydraulic stabilizer!” Keith snapped. 

The adjustable arm on the engineer’s screen whirred as Hunk moved it. Keith almost relaxed, but only a moment later, Hunk gulped and mumbled, “Oh. Oh no.”

Keith’s hands tightened on the controls as he continued the descent to Kerberos. Why was Hunk even in the fighter track if his nausea was this bad? Sure, he was smart, but that didn’t mean anything if he couldn’t perform under stress. “Stop complaining and fix it!” Keith snarled. Two more seconds, and they’d enter Kerberos’ thin atmosphere. They were almost there. If Pidge and Hunk could just keep it together for a few more minutes…

“I lost contact! The shaking is interfering with our sensors!” Pidge announced.  

Of course it was. Keith clenched his jaw and kept his eyes trained on the dashboard and the display of Kerberos. The damaged stabilizer made flying harder, but it was still possible that they wouldn’t fail this sim completely.  

“It’s not responding,” Hunk said as his seatbelt clicked open and he stood and crossing to perform the repairs manually. Good. Now they were getting somewhere. 

A second later, a soft beep alerted Keith to the visual indication of their landing point appearing on the display. “Preparing for approach on visual,” Keith said, leaning forward slightly in his seat.

“I don’t think that’s advisable given our current mechanical, and, uh--” Pidge paused for a moment as Hunk gagged, “--gastrointestinal issues.”

Hunk looked up long enough to add, “Agreed!”

Keith let out a short, frustrated sigh. “We’re not giving up now! Just do your jobs, and everything will be  _ fine!  _ Pidge, hail the crew and let them know we’re coming. _ ”  _ The shuttle shuddered violently for a moment, as if the simulation had gained enough sentience to actively disagree with him.

Pidge grumbled as he unbuckled his seat belt to reach for the short-range radio. “Whatever. Attention lunar vessel--” he began, and then cut off with a shriek when the shuttle shook again, sending his tiny frame crashing to the floor.

Why did Keith have to be the one assigned to these two? His grip on the controls was so tight that his knuckles looked white under his skin. “Damnit, Pidge, sit down! Hunk, what the hell are you doing back there, because you don’t seem to be fixing anything!”

“I’m tryin-- oh no.” Hunk began to protest, and then actually vomited into whatever he’d been trying to fix. As the acrid smell of regurgitated cafeteria food filled the small space, Keith smacked his skull back into his headrest, staring up at the ceiling for a brief moment. Seriously. Why him. Had Shiro organized this? Was it payback for that time he’d dumped itching powder into his shampoo?

Pidge finally managed to get back into his seat and began the hailing process again. “Attention lunar vessel, this is Galaxy Garrison rescue craft One-Victor-Six-Three-Tango coming in for landing and extraction...against crew recommendation.” Keith ignored the snide comment and refocused on the landing approach. He directed the shuttle down into the valley, only to be faced almost immediately with an obstacle the angle of the cliff had hidden from him previously. “And look out for that overhang!” Pidge added 

It would be nice if they could have a little more confidence in his skills. “I’ve got this,” Keith growled. “Just hold on to something!”

Hunk, apparently, didn’t like the sound of that. “Wait, wait, wait--!”

They didn’t have time for Keith to cater to Hunk’s nausea, so instead of going around the arch, Keith tilted the shuttle into a horizontal spin, leaving just enough room for the wing to pass through the highest point of the arch without crashing into the ice. Unfortunately, while Pidge had strapped himself in, Hunk hadn’t, judging by the dull thunk of his heavy frame against the side of shuttle. Keith’s scowl deepened as another alert began blinking. “Hunk! Get up and get to work!”

Hunk’s only reply was a pitiful moan, but sadly Pidge still had plenty to say. “Maybe he could if it weren’t for  _ someone’s  _ reckless piloting!” 

Keith let out a wordless snarl as he turned to glare at his teammates. “It was either that or crashing!”

Pidge scowled back at him. “Well at this rate, we’re going to crash anyway, so--!”

“Oh man…I wish Lance were--” Hunk snapped his mouth shut as a brief moment of silence fell over them, interrupted only by the shuttle’s constant shuddering. Keith froze, uncertain of what to say but unwilling to push too hard. He was bad with people, yeah, but he knew there were some lines you didn’t cross.  

Pidge’s eyes widened and he cut through the quiet when he pointed to the display and cried, “Oh shit, shit, look out!”

Keith whipped around, and flinched back when he was greeted with the sight of a cliff face that was far, far too close to shuttle for comfort. He frantically tried to direct the shuttle away from it, but the ship wasn’t mobile enough, and soon the screen went black, flashing  _ SIMULATION FAILED  _ in red. Keith slammed his clenched fist down onto the dashboard as the displays went black. 

“So much for doing your job,” Pidge muttered as he and Keith unbuckled their seat  belts and Hunk slowly climbed to his feet.

The doors slid open, illuminating the simulation craft with the hard white light of the Garrison and revealing Iverson standing just outside, frowning down at them with his arms crossed. The three cadets reluctantly shuffled out and lined up, backs against the glass wall as they’d been taught. All of the Garrison’s sim classes used constructive criticism as a teaching tool, but this was the first time Keith wished they didn’t. In his previous classes, his fellow cadets might have spotted a couple of flaws in his technique, but this was the first time he’d have to listen to them dissect a complete and total failure. The fact that it wasn’t totally his fault wasn’t much of a comfort.

“Well let’s see if we can’t use this complete failure as a lesson for the rest of you students,” Iverson barked. “Can anyone point out the mistakes these three so-called cadets made in this simulator?”

Keith narrowed his eyes at a tiny piece of blue lint caught on Iverson’s collar and tuned out the criticism offered by his peers.  He knew what they’d done wrong, and he didn’t need anyone to rub it in. He succeeded for the most part, letting Iverson’s shouting about approved lubricants and safety regulations wash over him until the man took a step toward him and raised his voice. “Kogane! Just because you were at the top of your class last year doesn’t mean you get to slack off, so pay attention! If you’re going to be this bad individually, you’d better at least be able to work as a team! The Galaxy Garrison exists to turn young cadets like you into the next generation of elite astroexplorers, but these kinds of rookie mistakes are exactly what cost the lives of the men on the Kerberos mission.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Keith saw Pidge’s spine straighten and the flat, neutral line of his mouth begin to turn downwards into a frown. The shorter boy opened his mouth to say something, but then Hunk’s broad hand came down on his shoulder and Pidge slumped slightly. 

Iverson wasn’t done chewing them out, unfortunately. He turned on Hunk first. “Garret! You were slow and anxious before you even got in the shuttle - you have got to stop letting your personal issues interfere with your performance. Gunderson! Spend less time talking back to your teammates and ignoring regulation and more time working. Kogane! You may be a good flier, but that means  _ nothing  _ if you fight with everyone you’re supposed to be working with. All three of you need to get it together before the end of the semester, or I will be having words with your advisors about dropping you out of the advanced track. Is that understood?”

“Yessir,” Keith muttered, with Pidge and Hunk echoing him reluctantly. 

“Good. Next!” Iverson called out. 

Keith slunk to the back of the small crowd of students, refusing to look Hunk or Pidge in the eye for the rest of class. When the bell finally rang, Keith kept his head down and headed to the mess hall with plans to do nothing but eat his dinner and retreat to his dorm room.

* * *

**[6:31pm] big brother’s watching:** so i heard your sim didn’t go well

**[6:40pm] big brother’s watching:** keith.

**[6:41pm] you:** what

**[6:41pm] big brother’s watching:** what happened?

**[6:53pm] big brother’s watching:** it can’t be that embarrassing.

**[6:55pm] you:** how did you even find out

**[6:56pm] big brother’s watching:** how did i, a teacher at the garrison, find out about the garrison’s top student failing a sim

**[6:56pm] big brother’s watching:** hm

**[6:57pm] big brother’s watching:** i wonder

**[6:58pm] you:** ugh why was i happy when you took this assignment?

**[7:00pm] big brother’s watching:** you love me ;)

**[7:01pm] big brother’s watching:** meet me at my office when you’re done eating

**[7:10pm] big brother’s watching:** keith

**[7:15pm] big brother’s watching:** KEEEIIITH

**[7:15pm] big brother’s watching:** my office, now, or I’m telling grandma that youre the one who scratched her car in July.

**[7:16pm] you:** that was YOU

**[7:16pm] big brother’s watching:** she doesn’t know that.

Keith let out a long groan and dropped his phone on his desk. Shiro and his parents had taken Keith with them to visit the branch of their family that still lived in Japan over the summer, and Shiro’s grandmother controlled the entire Shirogane clan with an iron fist. She was physically unintimidating but wielded guilt like a blade. Keith would do a lot of things to avoid being on the end of another one of her lectures. Including putting up with his adoptive brother’s fussing, apparently. He scooped up his phone, dropped it in the pocket of his dark jeans, and adjusted his jacket so that it was hiding the dagger he kept hidden under it. After leaving his room and beginning the trek to the junior instructors’ offices he only passed a few cadets in the halls, some still in uniform, and some who had changed into their casual clothes after classes like Keith. Shiro’s office was tucked into a quiet corner of the Garrison complex, though Keith didn’t know whether that was due to choice and Shiro’s shining reputation or simply chance.

When he reached the door marked  _ Cdr. Shirogane,  _ Keith tapped the button that opened from the outside and stepped through as it slid open. Shiro looked up from his laptop and gestured at the metal chair reserved for visitors to his office. “I’m glad you finally showed up. I was worried you were going to get lost again,” Shiro teased, smirking slightly.

Keith dropped onto the chair with a loud huff, crossing his arms. “That was  _ one  _ time! And it was my first week at the Garrison!”

Shiro’s smirk began to widen into a grin. “You wandered the halls for an entire hour--”

_ “Shiro!”  _

Chuckling, Shiro pushed his laptop to the edge of his desk so he could set his clasped hands down on the metal surface instead. “So what happened with the sim? I thought you were getting along better with your teammates?”

Keith sighed and refused to meet his brother’s gaze. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“This is the first time you’ve ever gotten anything lower than a ninety percent on a sim. So yes, we have to talk about it, because you promised me you’d try to be a better team player. Have you spoken to them outside of class at all?”

Keith looked back at Shiro and opened his mouth, a sharp retort prepared on his tongue. It died when he saw the expression on the man’s face; there was nothing but open sympathy there. Yelling at Shiro wouldn’t solve his problems and he’d feel guilty about it for the rest of the week, so Keith held his tongue. After a moment of silence, he finally admitted, “I tried, okay? I asked if we could do some homework together, like you suggested, but they spent the whole time working on some project for AP Computer Science and I had  _ no idea what they were talking about.” _

Shiro frowned slightly. “Did you try talking to them at all?”

“About what?”

“...Video games? TV? The existence of extraterrestrial life?”

Keith threw his hands in the air. “I don’t watch TV! Or play video games! And we’re all students here, of course we believe in the possibility of aliens!”

Shiro looked like he was talking to a particularly pathetic drowned kitten instead of his younger brother. Keith didn’t appreciate it. “There has to be something you three have in common.”

Slumping back into his seat, Keith muttered, “Does it really matter? I’m pretty sure they don’t want anything to do with me. Especially Hunk.” It wasn’t that they went out of their way to be mean - Keith was pretty sure that was just part of Pidge’s personality - but for an amicable guy, Hunk had never been interested in talking to him.

“Hunk...that’s Iosefa Garret, right? And your Comms Specialist is Pidge Gunderson?” Shiro’s gaze lost focus for a moment as he thought.

“Yeah…”

A few seconds later, Shiro let out a heavy sigh. “Let me guess: he’s mentioned Cadet Espinosa?” 

Keith stiffened. “How did you know?”

Shiro reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you didn’t notice, but he knew Cadet Espinosa really well.”

Keith rolled his eyes.  _ “Everyone  _ knew Espinosa. Hunk’s the only one who’s still mentioning him.” Or at least everyone claimed to know him, in the months after the Kerberos mission ended in premature disaster. All of the cadets seemed to want a personal stake in a tragedy that hadn’t actually touched them. Some of them wept over Commander Leon, who had taught the introductory flight classes for the past four years, but most of them talked about Lance Espinosa in hushed tones either reverent or scornful. Depending on who you asked, he was a disgrace who got something he didn’t deserve when he won the internship and paid the price for it, or a model cadet who had died too young. The boy Keith vaguely remembered flitting through the edges of his memories of the Garrison was neither of those things - a good student, but loud and distractible, though he always seemed to have a smile for everyone. 

“They were best friends, Keith. Things must have been rough for him after the crash. As for Cadet Gunderson - he tested out of a full two years’ worth of classes, so he’s got his own problems to deal with. Maybe try cutting them a little more slack?” Shiro said. 

“I’ve been cutting them slack!” 

Shiro leaned back slightly in his seat and just looked at Keith.

Okay, maybe he’d been a bit harsh during the sim. “I’ve been  _ trying,”  _ Keith said sullenly. “It’s not my fault if they don’t put in any effort into teamwork.”

Shiro actually dropped his face into his palm at that. “You are really not in a position to judge anyone for how well they work in a group.”

Keith opened his mouth to retort, then paused because...well, it wasn’t like he was wrong. 

Leaning forward again, Shiro said, “Look, you have a few months left in the semester. If you pull it together, you can make up for your bad grade on the sim and finish your class with a B. But there’s no way you’ll be able to do that if you can’t be in the same space as your teammates for longer than three minutes. You said you joined them for a study session, right? Do they have a regular schedule?”

There were two options: Keith could answer and put up with Shiro pushing him to “bond” or whatever with Hunk and Pidge, or he could lie. As a teenager who desperately wanted to avoid his older brother’s meddling, he picked the second option. “No,” Keith muttered as he looked down at his hands. 

Shiro let out yet another sigh. “I know you’re lying.”

“I’m not lying!” Keith spluttered.

“You’re picking at your gloves,” Shiro said flatly. “You always do that.”

Keith froze. He hadn’t even realized that he’d been fiddling with the strap of his left glove. Damnit. “I hate you,” he muttered. 

“That’s a lie too. Are they meeting tonight?”

Keith groaned. Shiro waited patiently and allowed the silence to stretch until Keith finally admitted, “Yes.” 

“Good.” Shiro’s face broke into a smile that made Keith feel inexplicably nervous as he stood up out of his chair. “Then let’s go.”

Keith blinked. “What?” 

“If I tell you to go meet them and don’t escort you there, will you actually go, or will you just hide in your room?”

Keith refused to answer that.

“Thought so. Where are we going?”

“...The roof.” 

* * *

The Galaxy Garrison had a strict lights out time of eight in the evening for junior cadets, so Keith hoped that he could convince Shiro to postpone this enforced playdate until another evening given that it was already 7:40. Unfortunately, his brother just  _ had  _ to be one of the few instructors that didn’t bother enforcing the more pointless rules like directing seventeen-year-olds to their beds as soon as the sun began to set which meant he was entirely out of luck. Keith grumbled and dragged his feet, but eventually he found himself following Shiro through the door that opened up onto the roof. Despite the fact that it was late October, the evening air was still fairly warm. Pidge sat close to the edge of the roof, headphones deafening him to Keith and Shiro’s approach, his phone, laptop and an array of other unrecognizable electronics scattered around him. Hunk was nowhere in sight. 

When Keith walked up next to Pidge, Shiro only a few feet behind him, and the other cadet still didn’t react to their presence, he kneeled down and tapped him on the shoulder. 

Pidge jumped, letting out a high-pitched shriek as he flailed, trying to get his headphones off. “Oh, uh, Keith! And - Commander Shirogane? Er...what’s up?”

Shiro stepped forward until he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Keith. His mouth was a thin, hard line instead of the small smile he’d been wearing earlier. “The original plan was to see if you’d be willing to put up with Keith for a little longer, but I’ll admit I’m curious as to where you got all this from,” he said as he gestured at Pidge’s equipment. “That’s not Garrison tech.”

Pidge’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “So...hypothetically, if I were to say that I built it, what would you do?”

The stiff line of his shoulders relaxed slightly when Shiro said, “First of all, I’d be impressed. What’s it for?”

“Just - looking at the stars. With this I can scan all the way to the edge of the solar system.” Pidge smirked up at them, pride swelling within his voice as he spoke.

Shiro crossed his arms. “That’s not far enough to look at stars then, is it? And where’s Cadet Garrett?”

Pidge shrank in on himself slightly as Shiro stared him down. When that unimpressed gaze was trained on someone else, Keith could almost find humor in how quickly people quailed under it. “He’s working on something for our computer science class,” said Pidge.

There was something far too familiar about that excuse. It was the exact same one they’d given Keith when they explained why they were focusing on something other than homework for the classes they shared. He looked over Pidge’s equipment once again. Some of it looked an awful lot like what he and Hunk had tinkered with. His frown deepening, Keith nudged the miniature radio telescope and said, “Wait, this is what you guys were building last month! Was it even for a class at all?!”

Pidge met Keith’s glare with one of his own. “Geez, calm down, Captain Hothead! The only rules we’re breaking are being out of bounds after lights out, which you two are also breaking! It’s not illegal to want some privacy!” 

“You  lied  to me!” Keith shouted, feeling inexplicably hurt. There was no reason for it; Pidge and Hunk had every right to go off on their own if they wanted to. Yet he couldn’t help the hot, shameful feeling bubbling up in his gut at the idea that the two people he was supposed to work with had wanted to avoid him so badly that they’d lied about it. 

“Cadet Gunderson,” Shiro ground out, his voice deadly serious. “I think you’d better explain what’s going on.”

“Ugh, fine! The world as you know it is about to change. The Kerberos mission wasn’t lost because of some malfunction or crew mistake, so I’ve been scanning the system. Trying to figure out what really happened. And I’ve been picking up alien radio chatter.” Pidge spoke in such a calm, certain tone that for a moment Keith didn’t register his final sentence. 

“Alien radio chatter?” Shiro repeated incredulously, his eyebrows creeping up his forehead. Keith was only slightly more willing to believe Pidge’s claims - he’d always found the idea of extraterrestrial life more likely than Shiro. But still. Alien radio chatter, picked up for the first time by a junior cadet at the Garrison? There was no way. 

"I’m serious!” Pidge insisted, scooping up a legal pad and showing the front page to them. Keith wasn’t particularly impressed; most of it was taken up by what looked like a child’s sketches of a sci-fi cartoon. “They keep repeating one word: Voltron. Tonight it’s going crazier than I’ve ever heard it.”

“...How crazy?” Shiro asked slowly.

Before Keith could formulate a response to that, a voice rang out from Pidge’s laptop. Despite the tinny distortion of low-quality electronics, it was still instantly recognizable as Hunk.  _ “Pidge! The sensors we set up out here are going crazy! I think something’s - holy shit do you see that?!”  _

Pidge refocused on his computer, leaning towards the screen and shouting, “What? Hunk, what’s--?”

He was cut off by the sound of the Garrison’s PA system coming to life, announcing, “Attention all students: this is not a drill! We are on lockdown. Security situation Zulu-Niner. Repeat: all students are to remain in barracks until further notice.”

Shiro stiffened and the moment the Garrison stopped broadcasting, he said, “I’m getting you two inside. Pidge, where the hell is Cadet Garrett? He needs to get back here now.”

Keith didn’t see Pidge’s response because he was too busy looking at the red-orange glow falling towards the earth. At first it just looked like an indistinct spot of fire, but as it descended it became clear that it was something solid heating up as it hit Earth’s atmosphere. “Are they really starting a lockdown for a meteor?” he muttered. 

Pidge scrambled for something in his backpack, revealing a pair of binoculars that he looked through for a moment before lowering them, his eyes impossibly wide behind his glasses. “That’s not a meteor - that’s a ship!”

“What?” Shiro exclaimed. He pulled the binoculars from Pidge’s slack hands and lifted them to take a look for himself. “Oh my god, it is.”

Pidge tried to make a grab for his binoculars, but his height made it impossible. “Is it a Garrison ship?” he demanded. 

“I...” Shiro paused for a second as he lowered the binoculars. Pidge snatched them back, but at this point the ship was low enough in the sky that Keith could see it for what it was without magnification.

“It’s one of theirs,” Pidge breathed, and a wide grin began to creep across his face. 

Holy shit. Aliens were real. Aliens were real, and  _ there might be one on Earth right now.  _ Were they humanoid at all? Would they be able to communicate? Were they peaceful or more like every cliche from an alien invasion classic? 

Pidge frantically began shoving all of his equipment back into his backpack. Keith was kind of amazed that most of it actually fit. He zipped it up, shouldered it, and began to run towards the door in one smooth movement. 

“Come on,” Shiro said, grabbing Keith’s shoulder and pulling him along as he began to follow Pidge. Raising his voice, Shiro shouted at Pidge’s back, “For the last time, where is Cadet Garrett?”

“I can show you, if you feel like coming with me! He should be near where that ship crashed!” Pidge called as he darted into the stairwell and took the steps down two at a time.

“What? You’re not going anywhere but back to your room!” Shiro’s long legs weren’t quite enough to allow him to catch up to Pidge’s determined head start. 

“No! I’m going to meet up with Hunk at that crash site so we can finally get to the bottom of this! The Garrison is covering something up, and I want to know what it is!”

It was harder for Keith to shout now that he was chasing after Shiro and Pidge, but he managed it between gasping breaths. “Why are you so sure it wasn’t just a pilot error?”

Pidge took a left as they exited the stairwell and began to sprint through the halls, his backpack thumping against his spine as he ran. Thankfully, all the other students and instructors seemed to have followed the directions in the announcement; they didn’t run into anyone who could rat them out for being out during a lockdown. Breathing labored, Pidge replied, “I saw the data feeds from the drones they sent to Kerberos after the ship went missing! They found no evidence of a crash anywhere!”

“Did you  hack into  the Garrison?” Shiro cried, sounding incredibly offended. 

“Illegal, I know, I’ve heard it all before! But come on, it’s suspicious! You must have noticed something, Commander, instructors get access to way more information than cadets do! The Kerberos mission went missing, the Garrison is trying to cover it up, and Hunk and are going to figure out why because the crew  _ deserves better than that!”  _

Shiro swore under his breath, but didn’t say anything else. Keith put on a burst of speed to catch up to him. “Wait, are we actually going along with this?” he demanded. 

“I don’t think we can stop him. Someone has to make sure he doesn’t get in too much trouble,” Shiro huffed as they took a right towards the stairway that would lead to the ground floor. 

Pidge snapped, “I heard that!” 

Well. At least this time, Keith could truthfully blame someone else for whatever disaster was sure to follow. Usually it was him making the reckless decisions, not Shiro. “I’m pretty sure you were meant to!” Keith called.

“Less chatting, more running!” Shiro barked. 

****

Somehow, they made it out of the Garrison without being caught, avoiding the few patrols with a combination of luck and Shiro’s knowledge of their patterns. As they put more distance between themselves and the main compound, they slowed their pace slightly, but by that point they were too out of breath to chat. Pidge pulled his phone out of his pocket and began to tap away at it, frowning darkly at whatever response he was getting from it. Eventually, they reached a cliff with a good view of the valley where the alien ship had crashed and the temporary structure the Garrison had set up within it. 

Pidge dropped to the ground and pulled his laptop out of his backpack, setting it down on the rock in front of him. He opened some kind of program and began speaking. “Hunk? Come on, Hunk, I know you’re there! Answer me!”

Shiro peered over Pidge’s shoulder, trying to get a closer look at what he was doing, but Keith was far more interested in getting a closer look at the encampment below. Neither of them noticed him going for Pidge’s backpack to find the binoculars.

They were high quality, equipped with both an impressive zoom function and night vision.  Through them, Keith got a clear look at both the UFO and the large number of Garrison guards surrounding it. It was definitely an alien ship; it’s dark, sleek exterior and gleaming purple lights looked nothing like the Garrison’s spacecraft. 

Hunk apparently decided that Pidge was worth talking to, wherever he was, because his voice began echoing from the laptop again.  _ “Pidge? Pidge, buddy, you’ve got to get a look at the video feeds inside there. They took someone out of that shuttle, and I - I’m pretty sure they’re human. I think, I mean, I think it might be…” _

Pidge stilled, his fingers hovering above the keyboard. “Wait, seriously?”

_ “Yes! Pidge, if this is a surviving member of the Kerberos crew--” _

“We’ve got to find out what’s going on,” Pidge finished grimly. 

That was when Shiro decided to cut in. “Cadet Garret, where are you?”

Something jostled in the background on Hunk’s end before he replied,  _ “Uh - are you okay there Pidge, because I could’ve sworn that was Commander Shirogane.”  _

“It is,” Pidge said flatly as he opened up another window on his laptop and began typing so that fast his fingers began to blur in the low light cast by the moon and stars. “He and Keith decided to pay us a visit.”

_ “What? Why? You - you’re not going to stop us!”  _

“Right now the only thing I’m interested in doing is damage control,” Shiro sighed. “Where are you?”

Pidge gasped as something changed on his screen. “You were right,” he breathed. Keith tried to get a better look, but Pidge was blocking his view as he hunched over his laptop. 

Even over the speakers, something in Hunk’s voice sounded wet and painfully vulnerable.  _ “Is it really--?”  _

“Yeah. It’s Lance, Hunk. We found Lance!” He sounded almost awed, shocked by his own success. 

“What?” Keith demanded, the word tearing out of his throat. Lance, as in Lance Espinosa? He was dead. He had to be. There was no way anyone could have survived a year alone in space--

Pidge adjusted his screen and scooted out of the way so that Shiro and Keith could get a clearer look at it. He began to explain, “They set up a security system inside and I managed to hack in. Look! It’s Lance! He’s  _ alive!”  _

The monitor clearly displayed the feed of the security camera for all of them to see, and though the footage wasn’t particularly high-quality, the person strapped down to a hospital bed at the center of the image looked far too much like the cadet that had gone missing a year ago for it to be a coincidence. He was clad in ragged black clothing and there was a shocking streak of gray in his brown hair, but other than that he was an almost perfect match for the formal photo of Lance Espinosa that had been displayed at the Garrison for the memorial of the Kerberos mission.

“Holy shit,” Shiro whispered, eyes wide. 

Pidge pressed a few more keys, then said, “Hunk, are you getting this? I’m forwarding the feed to your phone!”

_ “Yeah. Yeah, I see him. Oh my god. Oh my god, it’s really him. I’m, I think I’m gonna cry, I can’t believe this. He’s here, Pidge!”  _

“And if he’s alive, that means there’s a chance for the other crew members too.” Pidge said, his eyes suspiciously wet. “I’m turning the audio on.”

Lance’s voice was the first thing they heard.  _ “I know, I know, what a shocker, I’m not telling a joke for once, ha ha, but you’ve got to listen to me! Please! I’m begging you! You don’t understand what’s out there, what they’re capable of--!”  _ He spoke urgently, practically tripping over his own words as he pleaded with the masked technicians hovering over him. He twisted against the straps holding him down, trying to move his hands or sit up or maybe just escape. It was impossible to tell. 

Keith knew better than to expect compassion from adults at the Garrison; much of its original funding had come from the military, and that showed in how they structured their classes and treated their cadets. But something about the lack of care shown for someone who was clearly panicking, who had been missing for a year, made him deeply uneasy. 

_ “Do you know how long you’ve been gone?”  _ one of the technicians asked, his cadence steady.

_ “I don’t know, months, years? It’s not exactly at the top of my list of ‘most important things to keep track of’ right now! We don’t have time for this! The Galra are coming for Voltron, and they’ll destroy everything in their path to get it!” _

Another mention of Voltron. The churning in Keith’s stomach intensified. There was no way both Pidge and Lance had come up with that name in connection to aliens simply by chance. Whatever it was, it was real.

Nobody acknowledged that Lance had even said anything. The technician on the left held some sort of scanner to the boy’s face, and didn’t move even when he flinched violently. _ “Sir, look at this. I think his eyes have been replaced with some sort of cyborg prosthetic. I didn’t even think that was possible!”  _

_ “Put him under until we know what they can do,”  _ someone ordered.

Lance’s struggles intensified, his neck craning as he tried to lift himself off the table.  _ “No, no, don’t put me under! No, please--”  _ His words began to slur together as he panicked, but the technicians didn’t seem to care as one of them approached with a syringe.

Shiro exhaled audibly. “What the hell are they doing? He’s clearly panicking, and they’re just making it worse. That’s not how you treat a cadet.”

“I don’t think they care,” Keith muttered. 

“They haven’t even asked about the rest of the crew!” Pidge said, as if that was the shadiest thing the Garrison had done this evening.

_ “Okay, that’s it. I’m getting him out of there.”  _ Hunk growled.

Pidge began typing again. “I’m with you on that, but do we have a plan? We need a disguise, or a distraction, or--” He stopped speaking and his jaw dropped open as several loud explosions and bursts of flame signaled multiple detonations on the far side of the valley. Keith jerked to his feet, staring as an alarm began to ring in the Garrison encampment and patrols began to move towards the blasts. 

_ “Uh, so, I’ve got that covered. I’m going in!” _

“That was  _ you?  _ What the hell, Hunk?” Pidge shrieked. 

_ “You said yourself that we needed a distraction, and I’m not going to let them bury Lance under red tape and secrecy again! Are you coming or not?”  _

“Damnit…” Pidge hissed and picked up his backpack once again, only for Shiro to reach out and grab his shoulder, holding him in place. 

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but this really isn’t safe,” Shiro began, and Keith knew immediately that it wouldn’t get the result he wanted. 

“You think I care about  _ safe?  _ I don’t care if I’m safe! I care about finding the people that went missing on the Kerberos mission! They tried to cover up what really happened with that story about a crash, and I’m not going to let them make Lance disappear too!” Pidge yanked his arm out of Shiro’s grasp and began clambering down the cliff towards the encampment just as Keith caught sight of a shadowed form on a hoverbike approaching from the far side of the valley. It had to be Hunk. 

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can convince you to go back and pretend this never happened?” Shiro sighed, watching Keith out of the corner of his eye.

“Are you kidding me?” Keith asked incredulously. “I’m not letting you do this alone!”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He sounded far from thrilled, but that didn’t stop him from following Pidge down the cliff, Keith right behind him. It wasn’t exactly an easy descent, but between the outcroppings and a few areas with a slope gentle enough to slide down, Keith was only a couple of bruises worse for wear by the time they reached the valley and began their run towards the main tent. By the time they reached it, the guard at the front door was sprawled across the ground, unconscious. Hunk must have gotten there before them. Pidge hopped over their body and ran through the doors, Shiro and Keith trailing behind him. Whatever it was that gave him so much energy - Adrenaline? Caffeine? Red Bull? - Keith wanted some of it. 

They jogged through the short hallway to the room where they’d put Lance, slowing to a walk when Hunk came into view, carrying a baseball bat in one hand and supporting Lance’s slumped form with his other arm. He didn’t look up when they entered the room; his dark eyes remained fixed on the unconscious boy leaning against him. 

Now that Keith could see him with his own eyes rather than through a video of questionable quality, it was obvious that whatever had happened to Lance during the year he was missing, it wasn’t anything good. A wide, ugly scar crossed his face from temple to temple, cutting over his eyes and nose. Probably the injury that had made it necessary to replace his eyes in the first place. His hair was much longer than it had been in the photos from the Garrison, brushing against his shoulders, and the unnatural streak of silver only made the gauntness of his cheeks more obvious. Lance couldn’t be any older than eighteen, but in that moment it was hard to tell. 

“We need to get out of here before they start coming back,” Pidge said urgently. 

Hunk jolted as if someone had hit him. “Right. Uh…”

Shiro moved toward him and said, “I can take Lance if you need help.”

Shaking his head rapidly, Hunk said, “No, nope, leai, not happening, the last time I let this guy out of my sight he was declared dead. You can hold the bat if you want to help.”

Shiro raised his eyebrows but didn’t protest, accepting the bat as Hunk shifted his hold on Lance so that he was cradling the other boy in his arms. Pidge bounced on his heels near the doorway, and as soon as Hunk began to move he broke into a dead run towards the exit. Keith fell in directly behind him, and Shiro and Hunk’s heavier footsteps echoed after. 

“The bike’s just behind those rocks!” Hunk called out. Keith looked back to see him pointing to their left with the hand he had hooked under Lance’s knees. It was kind of impressive that he managed to run at full speed while carrying someone else; the extra weight didn’t seem to be affecting him at all. 

As they dashed around the cluster of boulders Hunk gestured to, Shiro said, “Keith! Get the engine running! You’re driving!”

Keith vaulted into the driver’s seat and noted with a faint glimmer of satisfaction that Hunk had been smart enough to leave the ID chip necessary to start the hoverbike in the ignition. As the others clambered on, he brushed a hand over the controls. Nothing unfamiliar. He could work with this. 

An unexpected flare of light blinded him for a second before his eyes adjusted as two of the Garrison’s ATVs drove into view. Judging by how fast they were going, they weren’t going to ask for them to return Lance politely.

“Come on, come on, we gotta go!” Hunk cried out.

A slow smirk unfurled across Keith’s face as he leaned forward and shouted, “I’ve got this! Just hold on!” 

A hoverbike was a lean, agile machine, and an expert pilot could outrace just about anything on one if they knew what they were doing. Keith, thankfully,  _ was  _ an expert pilot. They were going to get out of here, and then Keith was going to demand some proper explanations. 


	2. Flight

Lance’s eyes snapped open as he jerked into a sitting position, scrambling to push away the blankets weighing him down. Wait. Blankets? Slaves didn’t get blankets, just a cot and a thin sheet of material that insulated enough heat to ensure they didn’t die. He looked around, fully expecting to see the blank metal walls of a Galra ship, but instead found himself sitting in a tent, the faintest hint of sunlight filtering through the semi-transparent material. He wasn’t laid directly on the plastic tarp that made up the floor, either; someone had set him down on a sleeping bag before covering him with blankets.

Earth. He’d made it to Earth, though the last thing he remembered was being strapped down by the people from the Garrison. But there was no way he was still with them - the tent was way too small to be one of theirs, and they probably would’ve moved him into an actual building anyway. So who had taken him?

Someone who cared enough to give him blankets. Lance slowly reached out and pulled one of them back over his lap from where it lay crumpled by his feet, rubbing the material between his fingers. It was wool, not hand-stitched, but manufactured to feel like it was, and in that moment the difference meant everything to him. He hadn’t felt anything even close to knitting since he left Earth. There’d been nothing like it in the supplies the Garrison gave the Kerberos crew, and the Galra favored smooth fabrics that were easier to manufacture. He was _home._

Lance curled over his lap and clutched at the blanket with both hands. He let out a shaky breath that grew into a strangled laugh, because seriously, getting emotional over a blanket? Had he really become that pathetic?

The sound of the tent unzipping cut through the silence. Lance pushed himself into a crouch, ready to move and react to whoever was about to enter his small sanctuary. He curled his hands into fists and desperately wished he still had a weapon. There were ways to fight without one, as he’d learned, but that was riskier.

Lance had no idea who was going to come through the tent flap, but he definitely wasn’t expecting Hunk. A Garrison technician, or a stranger, or even an alien that had followed him back to Earth, sure, but Hunk? Warm, friendly Hunk, who gave the best hugs and impressed Mamí with his recreation of her pastelitos? He’d imagined seeing his friend again, yeah, just like he’d imagined seeing his family, but...he also hadn’t really expected it to happen. Now that it was, Lance had no idea what to do, so he froze and stared mutely.

Hunk didn’t seem to have the same problem. His eyes lit up and a wide grin spread across his face as he clambered inside the tent, half-crawling, half-walking towards him. There was no way either of them could stand up within the confined space. “Lance! Oh my god, Lance, you’re up! I was getting worried, I didn’t know what those Garrison techs had injected you with, and - oh, you’re probably hungry, right? I think I have a spare energy bar lying around here somewhere.”

A wave of warm affection overtook Lance as Hunk began to dig through the many pockets in his pants and vest. Lance had no idea how long it had been, but all the important parts of his best friend were still the same; he still cared as easily as he breathed, and shit, Lance had missed him. Without consciously thinking about it, he rocked forward on his feet and flung himself at Hunk, wrapping his arms around the larger boy and pulling him into a hug.

Hunk stilled for a second before engulfing Lance within his embrace, his arms wrapping around Lance’s smaller frame and squeezing so hard that it put pressure on his ribs. Lance buried his head under his friend’s chin, letting out a shuddering breath as he took a moment to soak in the warmth of another human body next to his and just listen to Hunk’s breathing.

Something soft and warm squished against Lance’s scalp. Hunk’s nose, probably. “They told us you were dead - that the Kerberos mission ended with a crash - but there was something wrong about the reports. I knew they were covering something up, and now you’re here, I can’t--” Hunk choked out, his voice wobbling as his chest began to shake under the force of his sobs. “And in the end, I didn’t even find you! You found me! I’m never letting you out of my sight again, what even _happened_ out there?”

How could Lance even begin to answer that? What was he supposed to do? Tell Hunk he’d been captured by an evil, intergalactic empire of slavers and conquerors and forced to fight  for his life for their entertainment? How could he admit that to Hunk, of all people?

Apparently Lance allowed the silence to stretch for too long, because Hunk continued, “Actually, I don’t care. You’re here! That’s - that’s all that matters.” He let out a loud sob and something wet fell on Lance’s hair. Hunk was crying. Over _him._ Because he cared about him. Had missed him.

Lance had no idea how long he’d spent in the clutches of the Galra - less than two years, judging by Hunk’s unchanged appearance, but other than that he genuinely didn’t know. It was nearly impossible to keep track of Earth time in deep space, and Lance had given up trying a maybe a month into his captivity.

It had been so long since he’d seen another human; being able to actually hug one was overwhelming. His fingers clenched in Hunk’s shirt as he inhaled deeply, trying to calm the hitch in his breathing. Lance had little success. His throat tightened as he began to sob, though no water accumulated at the back of his eyes or spilled over his lashes. His tear ducts had been burnt out in the same injury that had originally blinded him. Something of that very human reflex remained, though, because the skin around the polymer that made up his prosthetic eyes itched.

“I got you buddy,” Hunk whispered, running his hand up and down Lance’s spine in a comforting gesture, and Lance _broke._ The people from the Garrison who’d found him had covered their faces, so the last human face he’d seen was Matt’s as the Galra dragged him away. Now Lance was back on Earth with someone he knew he could trust, and it suddenly became impossible to pretend he was fine. He’d always been an ugly crier, breath escaping his throat as a noise like a wounded animal and snot building up in his nose. Some distant part of him felt bad for subjecting Hunk to a full-blown crying fit, but he had a hard time processing anything beyond than his all-consuming relief at escaping. Most days, it had been an impossible dream instead of a concrete goal.

Hunk continued rubbing his back and making wordless shushing noises. Slowly, Lance’s breathing calmed. He sniffled once, twice, then pulled back slightly from Hunk so that he could look his friend in the eye. Hunk met his gaze then inhaled sharply.

For a moment, Lance couldn’t figure out what had surprised him, but then it clicked. “Haven’t seen my new eyes yet, huh? What do you think of the color?” He winked and forced himself to smile.

The first time he’d looked into a mirror after the surgery, he hadn’t been sure whether to feel grateful or sick. The prosthetics the Druid - Lona - had created looked like a close approximation of human eyes at first glance, with a white background and a blue iris. But where a human eye had many shades of color that shifted in the light, Lance’s irises were now entirely the same blank shade of blue, and where normal people had capillaries crossing the sclera to deliver oxygen, there was nothing but pure white on the prosthetics. Eyes were supposed to be living organs; the replacements the Galra crafted were anything but. They had turned what had once been his favorite feature into a symbol of everything he despised.

Unfortunately, Lance’s words only made Hunk look like he’d murdered a puppy right in front of him instead of lightening the mood. “ _Lance,_ ” he croaked as he began to tear up again.

Oh no. If Hunk started crying again, then Lance was going to try and join in, and he’d already embarrassed himself enough for one day. “C’mon, if you keep doing that, I’m gonna think you’re not happy to see me,” he teased.

Hunk let out a wet laugh and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Guess we can’t have that, huh?”

Lance’s smile softened into something a little more genuine than the sharp grin he’d learned to fake over the past year. It was so good to see his friend again, but the lingering aches and pains from his escape and subsequent crash served as a constant reminder that they had bigger problems to worry about than his longing for a bit of home. Voltron. Blankets and a sleeping bag and a friendly human face were wonderful, but they wouldn’t save Earth from the Galra. “So, uh, where am I? How did you even know the Garrison had me?”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Hunk said, “We’re at a campsite I set up a while ago when I started trying to figure out what really happened when you went missing. The Garrison sent probes to Kerberos, but they never publicized the feeds or tried to retrieve any of the wreckage - they said that there was a crash caused by pilot error. They tried to cover it up. I started digging, and...when that spaceship crashed, we found you.”

Lance swallowed the bitter taste of betrayal. Sure, he hadn’t expected the Garrison to send out some kind of rescue mission - that would have been way too risky and doomed to fail - but the idea that they had tried to ignore what really happened to the Kerberos crew? That hurt. But wait--

“We?” he asked.

Hunk nodded. “I didn’t get you out of there alone. If you’re up to it, you can come outside and meet everyone else? I mean, there are going to be a lot of questions, so I don’t want to push you, but…”

Lance crossed his arms and grimaced for a moment when his hands came into contact with the standard slave rags. He’d hoped to look a little more presentable when he returned to Earth, but he didn’t really have time to casually stop by the nearest space mall and pick up jeans and a t-shirt before his, er, emergency landing. He started to get to his feet and said, “Gotta say, I wish I could be a little more fashionable to meet my saviors for the first time. Are any of them hot girls? Boys? Non-binary humanoids?”

Hunk snickered. "Sure, dude. You still think I'm hot, right? And - actually, one second.” Hunk leaned over and reached out to the corner of the tent where he’d stuffed a small duffle bag. After tugging it towards himself, he rifled through its contents for a few seconds before pulling out an incredibly familiar army jacket. He held it out to Lance and didn’t quite meet his eyes as he said, “I - um, after the Garrison declared you dead, I just...look, man, this has been the worst year of my entire _life,_ and I just - I wanted to keep something of yours? So. Here.”

Something tight and hot built up in Lance’s throat as he slowly reached out to take the jacket from Hunk. He stared down at it, rubbing his fingers over the fleece lining. His sister, Catalina, had insisted he take something warm and large enough to grow into with him when he’d decided to leave home to pursue his dreams of going into space. Lance had kept this jacket safe and clean through his three years at the Garrison, throwing a fit the one time he’d spilled tomato sauce on it and spending hours trying to clean it out. The vinegar Hunk helped him steal from the kitchen hadn’t gotten rid of everything, and Lance could still see the faint stain near the collar, just slightly darker than the rest of the jacket.

“I’m sorry if it’s creepy or something--”

“No,” Lance cut him off, slipping the jacket on and relaxing slightly under the familiar weight. “Thank you. For…everything.”

Hunk rewarded him with a smile before getting to his feet and pushing the tent flap open, letting in a sliver of light. “You ready?” he asked, glancing back.

Lance nodded and said, “It’d be pretty rude not to thank my rescue party, don’t you think? Let’s do it.”

Hunk exited the tent. Lance allowed himself a moment to breathe before following.

When he stepped outside, the first thing he did was look up at the sky. The light was still low, the sun hovering just barely over the horizon, painting the few clouds in shades of gold. Lance had seen a lot of alien skies and even a few sunrises over the past year, but there was always something off about them, something that made it all too obvious that he was millions of lightyears from home. He closed his eyes for a moment, inhaling the dusty desert air as he soaked in the feeling of sunlight on his skin.

His eyes flew open when a familiar voice called, “Lance!”

Just to his left, in front of a tent matching the one he’d just exited, stood a boy with brown hair and eyes and glasses and a thick roll of black cloth in his arms. _“Matt?!”_ he gasped, hardly believing his eyes. The last time he’d seen the older boy, Lance thought they’d never meet again. How the hell was he on Earth?

“Um. No,” the boy - no, _girl_ said, lowering her gaze. Her eyes were slightly more golden than Matt’s, and that was Katie’s voice, not her older brother’s.

That still didn’t explain her presence. “But - Katie? What are you doing here?”

Katie opened her mouth to respond, but before she could answer the faint crunch of sand under shoes alerted Lance to someone else’s presence. He turned to see two people approaching. The first was Takashi Shirogane in his formal Garrison uniform, and - oh hell no.

“What is _he_ doing here?” Lance squawked, pointing at Keith Kogane, who was still wearing that same ridiculous crop jacket and that same ridiculous mullet. The other boy scowled at him, crossing his arms over his chest.

Next to Lance, Hunk shrugged. “He got assigned to the same sim group as Pidge and me, and I guess he sort of got roped into all of this last night.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to know what ‘all of this’ is. Where have you been? What is Voltron? And why are you calling him Katie?” Keith asked.

Ha. If Lance wasn’t going to tell Hunk the answer to that first question, he certainly wasn’t going to tell _Keith._

Katie - Pidge? - said, “Okay, so maybe I lied about my identity to get into the Garrison. That’s not important. I think I can answer that question about Voltron.” She took a couple steps towards the rest of them before dropping to her knees. She unfurled the cloth to reveal an array of post-it notes, photos of some kind of carvings, a map of the Mojave, and graphs and diagrams of things that looked scientific but Lance couldn’t identify. “When we started listening to the alien chatter, the word ‘Voltron’ wasn’t the only thing I found. Hunk figured out that they kept repeating a series of numbers making up a Fraunhofer line--”

“A what?” Keith interrupted.

Hunk picked up for Pidge. “It’s a number describing the emissions spectrum of an element, only this element doesn’t exist on Earth. I built a machine to track it down, and after a _lot_ of fine-tuning it led us here,” Hunk explained, pointing down at a picture of a cave mouth.

“There’s a bunch of petroglyphs inside telling the story of what looks like a blue lion fighting in some sort of battle. We were trying to figure out if it had something to do with what happened on Kerberos, but then you crashed,” Pidge finished, glancing over at Lance.

Shiro - he prefered to be called Shiro, right? Lance remembered some rumors about that from the Garrison - frowned slightly. “There’s nothing else in the cave? You couldn’t find the source of the emissions?”

Hunk shook his head. “No. They’re definitely stronger there, but wherever they’re coming from, they’re not in the cave itself. Or at least not in the part we explored.”

Lance couldn’t help but marvel at Hunk’s intelligence, just as he had many times in the past. Pidge, too. He’d spent more time with Matt than his younger sibling, but the few times they’d talked left him with the lasting impression that she was just as intimidatingly smart as the rest of her family. Lance never would’ve been able to figure this out on his own; the only reason he knew about Voltron at all was because he’d been told.

In a twisted way, Voltron was responsible for his escape. Lona’s fear of what Zarkon could do with such a weapon was the only reason she'd revealed her true allegiances and freed him so he could try to warn Earth. 

He wasn’t worried about the consequences for Lona; she could take care of herself, and Lance wasn’t entirely sure he’d care even if she was hurt. That didn’t mean no one else was being punished for his escape, though. He couldn’t let this be for nothing. Fingers tapping restlessly against the thin cloth of his pants, Lance spoke up, “It’s a place to start looking though. We’ve got to find Voltron before anyone else does. I don’t know the specifics, but it’s supposed to be some kind of weapon and the Galra are already on their way to Earth to get it.”

Keith’s eyebrows drew together as he continued to frown. Lance kind of wondered if he was capable of smiling. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the other boy do so back at the Garrison. Keith asked, “What are the Galra? You mentioned them last night.”

Lance blinked, trying to remember what the hell the other boy was talking about. His memories of what had happened after the crash were a little fuzzy. He vaguely recalled trying to warn someone from the Garrison about them, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t believed him. Lance wasn’t sure he’d believe someone who just crash landed and was trying to tell him about an impending alien invasion either. The Galra Empire probably sounded like one of the interchangeable antagonists of a hundred different sci-fi franchises, so threatening it was hard to take seriously. Earth was still debating whether extraterrestrial life existed at all. Going from that to fighting an intergalactic fascist empire was...a bit of an adjustment. Lance shrugged one shoulder, saying, “Uh...think the Empire from Star Wars. Massive, evil army of fascists trying to take control of the entire known universe, but purple, and furry, with giant cat ears. They’re kind of awful.”

“Wait, seriously? And they’re coming here? Like, now? Right now?” Hunk asked, glancing around as if a Galra would appear out of the dust and rock of the open desert.

Shiro crossed his arms and said, “Lance is right. If the Galra are already on their way, we have to get moving. Hunk, Pidge, can you take us to the cave you found on your hoverbike?”

Pidge pushed her glasses further up her nose. “Sure. It’s not too far from here.”

“I’m driving,” Keith said, then turned on his heel and began to walk towards the vehicle parked a short distance away from the tents.

Hunk began to hurry after him, saying, “Uh, no, because I remember your driving from last night and I do  _not_ want to throw up again. And I have the ID chip! It’s not like you’re going anywhere without it!”

Keith muttered something that Lance couldn’t hear but slowed down enough that Hunk could catch up to him. Looked like his ‘I’m too good for other people’ attitude hadn’t changed all that much in the time Lance had been gone. It was almost a shame, because he was still just as-- okay, yeah, no. Not going there. Keith was an asshole, Lance hated him, and that was the end of the story.

Lance fell in step just behind Pidge and Shiro as they headed towards Hunk, who slid into the front seat of the hoverbike as Keith perched rather precariously on one of the wings. “Is this thing even big enough to carry all of us?” Lance asked as he eyed the vehicle dubiously. Three people, sure. Four people, maybe. But six? Pidge was small, but she still took up space.

“It did last night,” Shiro said, hopping onto the tail of the bike.

Lance blinked. “Seriously? Are you sure?”

Pidge rolled her eyes and squeezed in behind Hunk. “I’m pretty sure we would’ve noticed if one of us fell off while we were fleeing for our lives from the Garrison.”

“Wait, you guys broke me out of the Garrison? Hunk, you delinquent!” Lance said gleefully, a wide grin splitting his face as he jumped up on the hoverbike just behind Pidge. It had taken all sorts of cajoling to get Hunk to do something as mundane as staying out after lights out hours when they’d been cadets together. He was kind of sad he’d missed this shocking character development. Like he’d taken a vacation (that had gone very, very badly) and come back to find his puppy all grown up.

“I wasn’t just going to let them keep you - who knows what they would’ve done!” Hunk protested, sliding his ID chip into the ignition.

A couple years ago, Lance would have argued against that. Then again, a couple years ago, he’d trusted the Galaxy Garrison. Now...well. He knew better than to trust anyone whose first reaction was to imprison someone. The silence stretched out awkwardly as Hunk looked back at him, obviously waiting for some kind of response.

Lance scrambled for something to say. “You just want to keep me all to yourself, huh, big guy?” he winked, a small smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. Words still came naturally, even when a good ninety percent of his brain was on high alert, screaming for a way to avoid a conversation, or a confrontation, or yet another battle in the arena. It was easy to toss out a hollow flirtation to ease Hunk’s mind, to keep him from peering too hard at the cracks where Lance had shattered under stress.

It was enough. Some of the tension in Hunk’s face vanished as he chuckled. “Sure thing, buddy,” he said and turned to face forward again, igniting the hoverbike’s engine. “Everyone holding on tight?”

They all let out vague grunts of agreement. Hunk leaned over the dashboard as the engine hummed and the hoverbike shot forward. Lance slid backward for a second before scrambling for a better grip with his hands, holding himself in place and ducking his head to protect his eyes from the wind. Without a tie to hold it back, his long hair whipped around his face. He spat out a couple of strands that got stuck in his mouth.

Pidge craned her head back so that she could look him in the eye, her glasses glinting in the sun. Shouting so she could be heard over the hum of the engine and the air rushing past their ears, she demanded, “What happened to Matt and my - Commander Holt? Did they make it to Earth too?”

Lance couldn’t bring himself to meet her gaze. “I - I don’t actually know. We were captured by the Galra together on Kerberos, but Matt and I were separated from Commanders Holt and Leon pretty early on, and then…” he trailed off and shook his head. The terror on Matt’s face when Lance had returned from the arena, covered in his own blood and a bit of flesh from his opponent’s eye clinging to his thumbnail, was still fresh in his mind. Matt had been hysterical, completely inconsolable until one of the other prisoners told him the only way to get out of the arena was to be injured enough to be sent to the work camps. Then he’d made a plan, and Lance had mechanically gone along with it, still lost in the vague haze that had settled around him as he stepped into the arena. Matt’s leg was broken, a guard had taken him away, and Lance hadn’t seen him since.

The life expectancy for slaves in the work camps was longer than those in the arena, and for domestic slaves it was even higher, but…that was a pretty low bar.

“Why do you care about the Holts so much? I understand why Hunk started looking into the Kerberos mission, but how did you get involved?” Shiro asked from behind Lance.

Lips pressed into a thin line, Pidge said, “Well...I guess I should come clean to you guys since Hunk and Lance already know. Matt’s my brother and Commander Holt is my dad. I joined the Garrison as Pidge Gunderson after they tried to ban me from the grounds for asking too many questions about the Kerberos mission. And, uh, I’m a girl.”

 _“What?”_ Keith croaked, gaping at her. It was a pretty unflattering expression on his face and Lance couldn’t help but snicker. Pidge only rolled her eyes.

Lance was pretty sure that Shiro let out a deep sigh, but it was kind of hard to tell over the hoverbike’s noise. “Understandable,” he said. “I’m going to assume that’s why Lance called you Katie?”

“Yeah. But you can keep calling me Pidge,” she said.

“Uh, not that I want to interrupt Pidge’s backstory episode, but Lance? You were captured by these Galra people? _That’s_ where you’ve been?” Hunk’s voice rose almost an entire octave by the time he finished speaking. The fact that he glanced over his shoulder at Lance, despite preferring to drive like a senior citizen, said a lot about how concerned he was.

The last thing Hunk needed was more to worry about when they were trying to beat the Galra to a superweapon. “Don’t look so worried, bro! It gave me plenty of time to work on these guns,” Lance smirked, flexing one of his arms. The difference wasn’t obvious through his jacket, but it was certainly a tighter fit than it had been a year ago due to the hard lines of muscle he’d built up.

“Eyes up front!” Shiro barked, causing Hunk to snap to attention just in time to swerve around clump of cacti.

“Sorry!” Hunk squeaked.

Shiro’s tone was calm and somehow soothing as he said, “It’s all right. How far are we from the cave?”

“Shouldn’t be much longer. It’s just up there,” Pidge answered, pointing over Hunk’s shoulder at an outcropping that towered over the landscape around it. Lance squinted, but he couldn’t tell if the any of the dark spots in the rock were the cave entrance or just shadows from this distance without activating the telescoping feature of his eyes. He’d already freaked out Hunk enough for one day, though. That particular surprise could wait.

Lance surveyed the area as they approached, but there was nothing except sand and rock. No humans. No sign of the Galra.

It almost didn’t seem real, returning home to find it completely untouched while the rest of the universe suffered under the control of the Empire. They’d conquered countless worlds, destroyed entire civilizations, and enslaved billions of sentient beings, if the stories were true. And Lance had seen enough to know that they probably were.

Yet Earth held the weapon the Galra wanted so badly.

Earth, whose people had yet to travel outside of their solar system under their own power. Earth, which was completely defenseless against any attack the Galra might launch. Why _hadn’t_ the Galra already taken Voltron from its hiding place? Was it really possible that this ragtag collection of humans had found it first?

None of it made sense. But they would know if the Galra had already reached Earth - they weren’t exactly subtle, what with their massive army and fleets of warships. Maybe this was a stroke of luck, the universe’s way of apologizing to Lance.

He dismissed the thought the instant it flitted through his mind. Ha. As if. If the universe were fair, if karma really existed, there was an endless list of people who deserved a break more than Lance. He’d probably stepped over some of their corpses as he struggled to survive the gladiatorial circuit, excusing each life he took as a necessary sacrifice if he ever wanted to see his family again.

But was it worth it? Lance didn’t know anymore. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known, or if it was just a story he’d told himself as he struggled to wash the blood off his hands each night and push the sound of bodies collapsing on the sands of the arena out of his dreams.  

Lance startled violently when someone tapped his shoulder, jerking him out of his thoughts and back to the present. It was Shiro, standing on the ground next to the hoverbike and watching him carefully - wait, when had they stopped? Heck, when had they reached the cliff they’d been driving towards?

Hunk and Pidge had already dismounted and Keith was sliding off the bike as Shiro asked, “Are you feeling okay? You spaced out there for a second.”

“Yeah, uh, I’m fine,” Lance said, jumping off and landing on the ground. What else was he supposed to say? No, I’m not, actually, I can’t stop thinking about all the people I killed? Sure, Lance, that’s a great way to introduce yourself to  _the_ Takashi Shirogane.

“Come on, this way!” Pidge called as she began to jog towards the mouth of the cave. Shiro watched Lance for a moment longer before turning and following after her. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, Lance walked behind Shiro as Hunk and Keith moved closer to the front of the group.

The morning sun was bright enough to illuminate the entrance of the cave and the ancient pictures carved into the walls as the five of them stepped inside. Shiro leaned closer to get a better look at one of the geometric etchings. “These are the carvings you guys were talking about?”

“Yeah,” Pidge said, taking a few steps deeper into the cave. “They’ve got to mean something, but....” She trailed off and let out a frustrated noise halfway between a groan and a hiss.

The carvings were everywhere, but it was hard to make all of them out; some were worn away by time, and dust covered much of the cave’s interior. Lance turned to the one closest to him and moved to wipe the dust away with his sleeve. Maybe if they could just get a clearer understanding of what story these pictures were trying to tell--

The moment Lance’s skin made contact with the cool stone of the cave walls, the carvings lit up with a blue glow. Lance jerked back, but the light only continued to brighten. “Uh, guys?” Lance squeaked, taking a couple steps back towards the others. In his experience, inexplicable glowing was usually bad news.

“They’ve never done this before,” Hunk said, glancing around. “I wonder how -  _woah!”_ he cut himself off with a shout as the ground beneath them lit up with the same blue light and crumbled, dumping them onto a slope kept slick with water. Lance scrambled for some sort of purchase as the others screamed around him, trying to find something to cling to and control his descent, but he only succeeded in chipping his fingernails.

The rock beneath them suddenly disappeared, dropping all of them into a shallow pool of water. Lance let out a long, sad groan as the impact jostled his old bruises. At this rate, he’d be lucky not to break any bones by the end of the day. Then he looked up, and all thought of his aches and pains fled from his mind.

No sunlight filtered this far into the cave, but the cavern they’d fallen into was lit up by a particle barrier glowing the same bright shade of blue as the carvings, and within that dome stood what looked like a giant robotic _cat_ of all things.

“Woah,” Lance breathed out as he pushed himself to his feet and took a couple steps forward onto dry ground.

The others weren’t far behind him. “Is this it? Voltron?” Pidge wondered out loud.

“It must be,” Shiro murmured as he walked up next to Lance.

Keith apparently didn’t understand the concept of waiting for your companions. He raced ahead while Hunk was still dusting himself off. “Looks like there’s a force field around it,” he said, his voice echoing through the cavern.

Lance looked up at the dull yellow lenses that made up the cat’s eyes as he approached alongside Shiro, Hunk, and Pidge. Apart from the low hum of the particle barrier, it didn’t seem to be active, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching. Assessing. It was a feeling he remembered all too well from when his final owner, Ozar, had spent a full hour watching him train before purchasing him. He slowed down slightly so that Shiro and Hunk outpaced him, but the sensation remained even with all of the others in front of him. Lance took a couple of steps to the side, and the faint light reflecting off of the yellow eyes seemed to shift along with him. “Does anyone else get the feeling we’re being watched?” he asked uneasily.

“Uh...no,” Shiro said, glancing over his shoulder at Lance, one eyebrow raised.

Lance continued forward diagonally, and sure enough, the gleam continued tracing his footsteps. “Are you sure? Because the eyes are totally following me.”

“I wonder how we get through this,” Keith muttered, laying his hands flat against the particle barrier.

Pidge darted towards Keith. “Do you think there’s some sort of switch somewhere?”

Probably not, given that the few times Lance had seen this kind of barrier before, they’d been generated by something within the shield. “Maybe you’ve just got to ask politely,” he joked as he stepped up and knocked on the barrier.

The last thing Lance expected was for it to melt away under his fingers. The carvings underneath the robot lit up as an impossible burst of wind rushed through the cavern, whipping his hair around his face.

His view of the cave vanished, replaced by the blue robot and four others streaking through a cloudless sky. Yellow, red, black, green, and blue joined together to form - a giant humanoid? With cat heads for hands and feet? And a flaming sword? Lance wasn’t sure if that was ridiculous or badass. Both, maybe.

The vision faded quickly, leaving behind only the memory of the massive robot against a field of stars. Lance blinked rapidly. “Uh, please tell me I’m not the only one who saw that,” he said. If anyone asked, he would vehemently deny the way his voice squeaked at the end of his sentence.

“Voltron is a robot! Voltron is a huge, huge awesome robot!” Hunk exclaimed.

Pidge stared up at the cat-robot-thing, her neck craned back so far it had to hurt. “And this thing is only one part of it! I wonder where the rest of them are…”

“Is this what they’re looking for?” Shiro asked, glancing sideways at Lance.

Shrugging slightly, Lance said, “It must be. I mean, that thing - _Voltron_ sure looked like it could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.”

Suddenly, the blue cat whirred to life, its torso shifting as it lowered its head. Lance took a couple steps backwards before he even realized he was moving, but the robot only opened its mouth and dropped some sort of ramp on the ground.

“So, do we just go in, or..?” Hunk trailed off.

Lance swallowed. The first time he’d entered an alien ship, it hadn’t been his choice, and each subsequent experience with them was worse. But this machine was a part of Voltron, and the absolute last thing the galaxy needed was a Galra Empire with an even more fearsome weapon. He had to go inside, had to get it away from Earth, because the Galra couldn’t be allowed to take it first.

Taking a deep breath, Lance strode up the ramp, back straight, eyes forward. The first step to confidence was pretending. Anything could be made real if you faked it hard enough. Some of the tension left his shoulders as he walked further inside and found nothing that reminded him of the Galra ships he was so familiar with; the accents were blue and white instead of purple and the metal was a lighter color than the near-black of the material used by the Galra.

The short hallway ended in front of the open doorway of what must have been some sort of cockpit. A comfy-looking chair sat in the middle of the room, and the curved front wall was completely black - probably a display of some kind.

“How do we turn it on?” Pidge wondered as she stepped into the room. “I mean, obviously it’s on in _some_ form, given that it could power the barrier and let us in, but how do we control it?”

Lance’s eyes flickered over the blank display as he walked in front of the chair. “I don’t know. It doesn’t _look_ like Galra tech…” Which was a good thing, because then there would be no way for any of them to activate it, but at least that would’ve provided some sort of answer. Lance dropped into the chair with a sigh only to let out a startled yelp when it slid forward, blue holograms coming to life all around him. The display turned on, providing a view of the cave.

If he could read whatever alien language the holograms depicted, Lance probably would’ve understood what was going on a whole lot better. But he didn’t, so all he had left was guesswork. Still, this was kinda cool. His fingers hovered just over the joysticks as he resisted the urge to start pressing random buttons.

“Okay guys, I feel the need to point out - just so we’re all aware - we are standing in some sort of futuristic alien cat head right now,” Hunk said, one hand on the back of the chair.

A sound halfway between a purr and a growl came out of nowhere as something cool and soothing touched - no, not _touched_ him, not quite. The last time Lance had felt this, a sensation like a vivid memory that was somehow undeniably foreign, it had been Lona, preparing to dig into the ruins of his eye sockets and his brain and _damnit,_ no, not now, he wasn’t going to lose it in front of four other people. He refused.

He clasped his hands together in his lap, digging his fingernails into the back of his other hand. Whatever it was, Lance could endure this. He’d survived the arena.The too-familiar touch of quintessence wasn’t going to kill him.

Probably.

The feeling retreated slightly, hovering far enough away that it wasn’t quite so overbearing, though Lance could still feel it. “Did, uh…” his voice cracked, and he tried to cover it up with a cough. “Did anyone else feel that?”

“Feel _what?”_ Keith frowned. No one else spoke up.

Just Lance, then. But why? Because he was the first to sit down? Because he knew what Lona - nope, not going there. The first theory worked fine. It was definitely just because he’d taken the initiative.

The purring picked up again, though now it was softer, more reminiscent of a house cat than anything. Lance had two options: stand up, walk out, and forget about fighting the Galra - or put up with the quintessence and try to figure out how to fly this machine. The first choice was incredibly tempting. He could leave. Never set foot on a spaceship ever again. See his family. Eat garlic knots.

Except no, he couldn’t. If Lance left now, the Galra would get their filthy purple paws on one of the five pieces of Voltron, and they’d continue expanding unchecked throughout the galaxy. Eventually, they would come back to Earth, and then he wouldn’t be able to live out the rest of his days in peace. No one would. Lance swallowed and slowly wrapped his hands, still trembling slightly, around the joysticks. The purring increased slightly in volume, but the touch of quintessence remained gentle and nothing like the harsh burn of Lona’s power.

An image flickered through his mind - a series of key presses on one of the holographic displays, followed by a faded memory of wind rushing over skin and a swoop of delight. The robot’s quintessence, urging him on. Though was it a robot if it had quintessence? Or was it some sort of sentient AI?

Keith’s voice cut through his thoughts like a blade, sharp and irritated. “Are you going to do something or are we just going to sit here?”

Irritation flared in Lance’s gut. Seriously, screw Keith (and not in the fun way). “You can’t rush genius, Mullet,” he smirked obnoxiously as he tapped out the sequence he’d seen. The room shifted as the robot let out a roar - out loud this time, given Hunk and Pidge’s shocked screeching.

“All right then. Let’s try this!” Lance punctuated his last word by thrusting the joysticks forward.

He expected the robot cat thing to move, probably even move quickly, but he was _not_ expecting the bubbling of joy in the quintessence, or for the robot to take the direction to move and decide to _fly straight into the ceiling._ “Wait, wait, wait--!” Lance protested, closing his eyes and cringing back into his seat when the robot showed no signs of stopping.

Lance was thrown forward a couple inches when the cat’s nose hit the rock, but he didn’t end up flying head-first into the display like he’d expected. Pidge squawked when she cracked her chin against the back of Lance’s seat, and Shiro stumbled. Instead of crashing into the cave wall and coming to a stop, the robot simply burst through the rock as if it were little more than a flimsy styrofoam board.

Layers of metal and whatever else constituted the robot’s inner workings muffled the sound of stone crumbling under its sheer power as it burst free, darkness giving way to a view of the clear blue sky. Pidge grabbed his arm to stabilize herself as the robot rocketed up into atmosphere. Something in the quintessence bubbled with - excitement? It brought to mind the image of a kitten batting at a toy, begging to play, and then--

The cat decided to perform an aerial flip. It moved so quickly that the centrifugal force kept everyone’s feet on the floor, but it did nothing to prevent them from making their displeasure known. Loudly. Especially Hunk.

“What are you _doing?”_ Keith shouted, far too close to Lance’s ear for his voice to be anything but piercing.

“Nothing!” Lance shrieked in reply. “It’s on autopilot or something!”

The robot’s purring burbled like a laugh as it tugged a half-forgotten memory of Lance’s childhood to the front of his mind - himself, much smaller, giggling and smiling until his cheeks ached as he demanded his uncle let him ride the roller coaster just one more time. The robot’s feet hit ground and it began to run, crossing the desert in great strides.

Fear clawed at Lance’s gut at the deeper connection to the foreign quintessence, an uneasy contrast to the bubble of happiness brought on by the memory. Sure, this cat thing _seemed_ benevolent, but was it? It was supposed to be a weapon, and the idea that the Galra wanted one with some sort of built-in morality was ridiculous.

The quintessence shifted from its earlier fluidity to a flat, hard denial, cold as ice, at the idea of serving the Galra. Then it sent a series of images: the cat - _lion?_ \- and a blue alien Lance didn’t recognize, on a dozen different planets, working together. Fighting, yes. But also helping people. Protecting them.

This wasn’t about taking a weapon that already existed. It was about corrupting something good into one, taking the lion from its original purpose as a protector and warping it into a tool of destruction. Lance was all too familiar with how skilled the Galra were at that. It was what they’d done to him.

The quintessence settled around him in what could’ve been a hug. Another denial, though softer this time. Then an image of a Galra cruiser approaching Earth and Lance’s heart leaped into his throat. No. No, no, nononono--

Of course they were here. It had been stupid and naive to ever think they wouldn’t. Earth wasn’t prepared. The Garrison had no way of combating them, no option but surrender. Except - the lion sent an image of destroying the ship while Lance directed it from the cockpit. The lion rumbled in his mind and leapt up off the ground, igniting its engines and rocketing into the atmosphere. Adrenaline raced through Lance’s veins as the beat of his own blood began to thunder in his ears.

Hunk squeezed down on Lance’s arm hard enough to hurt. “Slow down, man, please!” he begged.

“I told you, I’m not doing anything!” Lance snapped, glancing at Hunk over his shoulder. Or maybe that wasn’t quite true. The lion’s quintessence seemed to be latching on to him in some way, smoothing out the roughest parts of his terror and shaping it into something that could be controlled. Used. Fear could be honed into determination to survive, or a decision to protect, and under the guidance of the lion’s steady presence Lance kept control of his shaking hands. Instead of returning to Earth and fleeing to the other side of the planet, he pushed the joysticks forward.

The Galra had taken him, and Matt, and Commanders Holt and Leon, but he damn well wasn’t going to let them have Earth. Not when his family and countless others still lived on it. He refused.

“Where are you _going?”_ Keith demanded, one of his fingers nudging at Lance’s skull as he clung to the seat.

“The lion says there’s a Galra ship approaching Earth and I think we’re supposed to stop it!” he answered, his muscles coiled tight and ready to burst into action as the lion raced past a cloud.

“What exactly did it say?” Pidge asked, straightening her knees so she could look Lance in the eye.

“It’s not really _talking,”_ Lance replied. How the hell was he supposed to explain quintessence to these guys? They were kind of short on time, and he barely understood anything about it in the first place. “It’s more like, I don’t know, showing me things? Images?”

“Well here’s an idea: how about we don’t try and fight the alien warship head on? Can’t we just hide or something?” Hunk asked.

Before Lance could even begin to formulate a list of all the reasons why that would end terribly, Shiro said, “No. We have no idea what Galra technology is capable of, but it’s probably far better than ours. If we could find the lion, so can they. Lance, do you really think this thing can take out the Galra ship?”

Well, no, not really. The lion was only about the size of a civilian passenger ship, and Lance had a hard time believing it had enough firepower to take down a battlecruiser. There wasn’t even a hint of doubt in the quintessence, however, and Lance wasn’t sure they had a choice. Even if they couldn’t take the cruiser head-on, maybe they could distract it, lead it out of the solar system and away from Earth. The only other option was...what? Letting it reach their home? No. Lance hadn’t fought so hard only to give up now.

“I don’t know. But I bet we can distract it,” Lance said. Their surroundings darkened from blue to black as the lion reached the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and continued on into space, away from the sun. He scanned the display for any sign of the Galra ship, but there was nothing but stars twinkling into the beyond. Then something in front of him rippled, distorting the pattern of distant lights for a moment before flaring in a shade of violet that Lance knew all too well. The Galra cruiser hurtled into view less than a second later, dwarfing the lion with its sheer size.

Lance clenched down on the joysticks as the others gasped around him. “Holy crap! Is that really an alien ship?” Hunk demanded.

“What _else_ could it be?” Lance directed the lion out of the cruiser’s path, curving around to face its side. He focused on his breathing, forcing himself to keep it steady as the anti-aircraft turrets mounted on the ship began to fire. The lion began to move the instance Lance’s hands shifted on the controls, rolling out of the way of the lasers as he shouted, “Hold on!”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Pidge shouted.

The lion showed him an quick series of images - a button press, a twist of the controls, and finally the lion firing a bolt of blue light from its mouth. “I think I have an idea!” Lance said, quintessence humming in the back of his mind. For the first time, it inspired more than just blind terror. He wasn’t just a pilot directing a thoughtless machine; the lion worked with him, sharing his plans and creating ones of its own. It dove beneath the Galra ship, dodging laser fire with only some assistance from Lance as he held down the button the lion had shown him. The quintessence vibrated, gathering power, and while Lance couldn’t exactly feel the lion as it moved, there was a sense of awareness. He knew how the lion’s feet and tail were positioned, knew how exactly how long the canon would take to charge.

The weaponry mounted on to the cruiser couldn’t rotate far enough to aim and fire at them as long as they were positioned just beneath the ship’s hull. It wouldn’t last forever - even hulking cruisers were surprisingly maneuverable in the vacuum of space. Lance took advantage of the momentary reprieve to twist the lion so that its mouth was aimed at the center of the ship and fired the cannon the second it was ready. Prison cells were always in the aft of Galra ships, so the best place to aim would be…

Blue light tore towards the center of the Galra cruiser, breaking through the hull with a blossom of fire. No shockwave or sound echoed out through the void of space, but the hole left behind in the metal was an obvious enough sign of the damage the lion had done. They definitely had the attention of whoever commanded the ship, but he doubted it would prevent it from pursuing them. Military vessels almost always had safeguards; secondary engine and weapons systems were only the beginning of the precautions.

Shiro clapped a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Nice job, Lance!”

Lance flinched away, but tried to cover it up as part of the motion of his shoulders as he twisted the lion into a barrel roll and then shot away from the cruiser. “Let’s see if we can get these jerks away from our planet.”

The display hovering just over his left hand flickered and shifted, showing an image of what could’ve been the solar system and a path leading out of it. They didn’t have time for Lance to question it. He followed the lion’s course towards the edge of the system.

A hologram popped up on his right, displaying the feed of some sort of rear view camera. While the lion was far more agile than the cruiser, the Galra ship didn’t take long enough to turn around to give them much of a head start.

“Uh, guys? Is it just me or does that ship seem to be getting closer?” Hunk asked nervously.

“No, I’m pretty sure it is,” Pidge said.

Lance clenched his jaw and tried very hard not to think about the last time a Galra cruiser had chased down a group of humans. He couldn’t do it again. Even if the Galra didn’t decide to make some sort of example out of him, Lance wasn’t sure he’d survive being captured again, not after coming so close to escaping.

“They’re not shooting at us though. They must want this Voltron pretty badly,” Shiro observed.

Lance would’ve preferred the shooting, actually. At least then they would go down with the lion. At least then, they wouldn’t have to be branded, wouldn’t have to see the arenas and work camps and the galaxy-encompassing empire bent on crushing everything else beneath its heel.

“Where are we going?!” Keith demanded. “We can’t just keep running!”

Pidge’s eyes darted between the side and front displays before fixating on something to the right of the ship. “Wait, is that Kerberos? It takes months for our ships to get out this far! How fast is this thing?”

“Most alien ships are-- shit!"Lance cut himself off with a yelp as he felt a massive shift in the lion’s quintessence, reaching out to...something. Someone? He had no idea.

It must have answered, because a moment later a massive disk blinked into existence, shimmering with starlight and - was that _blue_ quintessence? Lance had only ever seen the Galra use purple, so where the hell was it coming from? The lion regarded it eagerly, its desperation to pass through almost tangible over the tentative bond it had forged with Lance.

“What _is_ that?” Pidge asked, leaning over Lance’s arm as if getting closer to the front display would let her figure out what strange feature of alien technology she was staring at.

“I don't know,” Lance admitted. “But whatever it is, the lion really wants us to go through it.”

Shiro said, “The lion hasn’t led us astray yet, so I say we trust it. But we’re a team now - we should decide together. Does anyone object?”

No one said anything. When Lance glanced to Pidge and Hunk, still standing at his left and right, they were both looking to him. As if he had the answers. As if his time with the Galra had given him some sort of knowledge or power, when it hadn’t. The Galra never gave, only took. But if there was one thing Lance had grown used to, it was making choices that weren’t actually choices at all and pretending that was his plan from the start. Between fleeing and leading the Galra away from Earth or attempting to take the cruiser head-on, it was pretty obvious which offered the better outcome.

“Well, I hope the rest of you didn’t have any plans for tomorrow,” Lance said.

This wasn’t how he’d imagined his homecoming, when he’d dared to dream of it. Lance wanted to see his family again, even just once. He wanted to see the ocean, feel the sand slipping between his toes and hear the crash of the waves against the shore. He wanted to protect humanity from what he’d experienced, and that - that, at least, he could still do.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all enjoyed this chapter. Thank you for all your support - it really does mean a lot to me. 
> 
> [IronRoseWriter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronRoseWriter/profile) has been kind enough to volunteer as my beta, and this chapter really would not have turned out as well without their help.
> 
> Large portions of this chapter were written while listening to [Natasha Blume's Journey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khG_x_D4SRY) on repeat, which is now my song for Blue in this AU. Please feel free to check out my [tumblr](https://starry-lullaby.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to chat.


	3. Defiance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! I hope you enjoy the chapter. Just wanted to let you know that I'm in the process of creating a playlist for this AU, which you can find [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/murmuredlullaby/playlist/4SBgAoklo1iLrXbb1lgkUA). It's still something of a work in progress, but the beginning is fairly fleshed out. Consider listening to it if you're curious.

Lance’s skin felt too tight, struggling to contain the restless energy vibrating in his bones. In less than an hour, he’d traveled through a wormhole to a surprisingly earth-like planet, met an alien princess (who was totally gorgeous and totally not interested) along with her advisor, and been strong-armed into becoming a paladin of Voltron. Before he’d even begun processing Allura’s plan of starting a seven-person rebellion against the Galra Empire, he and Hunk had been shuffled back into his lion to retrieve the Yellow Lion. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure you could call that a plan. Lance absolutely sympathized for Allura, because geez, losing your entire civilization and ten thousand years of time to the Galra? That was shitty luck. But taking on the Empire with seven people and six ships was kind of nuts. And that was assuming they managed to get all the lions before the Empire did. 

But the other option meant telling Allura, who seemed so  _ certain  _ and  _ hopeful,  _ that they didn’t have a chance. The other option meant laying down and waiting to die. Despite his misgivings, Lance couldn’t bring himself to do that. 

As they waited for Allura to clear them for takeoff, his fingers drummed against his lion’s controls. Blue’s? Maybe Lance should start calling it Blue. That sounded more like a name, and since it obviously had some level of consciousness, it should have one. Did that mean he needed to assign pronouns too? 

Blue’s quintessence rumbled in something that felt a lot like a laugh. 

“Hey, I’m trying to be polite!” Lance whined aloud. 

On his left, Hunk raised an eyebrow. “Uh - dude. Who’re you talking to?”

“It’s just Blue,” Lance said, waving him off. “Do you think the lions use pronouns?”

“What?” 

A small hologram displaying Allura’s face and a bit of the bridge behind her popped up on the display. “Paladins, if you’re prepared to depart, I am ready to open the wormholes.”

Lance dredged up a smirk as he urged Blue to engage the engines. “Sure thing, Princess.”

Blue rocketed through the atmosphere, leaving the castle behind in mere moments. Allura’s screen vanished and an uneasy silence filled the cockpit. Once, Lance would’ve known how to break it; now, he barely remembered how to form sentences that weren’t a colorful lie or a forced agreement. He wanted to apologize for dragging Hunk into this. He wanted to ask Hunk about his family. He wanted a lot of things. But the idea of admitting them felt like a shameful weakness, so his tongue laid in his mouth like a corpse, silent and cold. 

As the quiet stretched, Lance did his best to keep his gaze focused straight ahead, yet he found it nearly impossible to keep his eyes from flickering to Hunk. The other boy finally cracked just as Blue began to enter the planet’s atmosphere. 

“Are you okay?” Hunk asked quietly. 

He could be honest. He could say:  _ No, I’m not. I can’t stop thinking about the blood on my hands and the number of people that had to die for me to be standing here today. I don’t know if this is a fight we can win. I think fighting the Galra is pointless, but I can’t stop, because if I let myself sit still for too long, all I can think about is how much I hate them. How much I enjoyed fighting Galra in the arena. Because they were free, and I wasn’t. Because they had a choice, and I didn’t, and they chose to be violent and cruel and they made me into something violent and cruel. _

Lance was capable of opening his mouth and letting those words spill out, but the idea made something hot and uncomfortable roil in his gut. So instead, he kept his eyes forward, focusing on pushing Blue into orbit, and said, “Me? I’m great! I could’ve done with something a bit tastier than whatever that food goo in the castle was, but anything’s better than Galra nutritional pellets. Those things are nasty, bro.” 

He glanced at his friend out of the corner of his eye just in time to catch Hunk’s mouth curve into a frown. “You know it’s okay to - not be okay, right? I mean, you were held prisoner for a year. No one’s going to blame you if you’re--”

When Coran appeared on the display and cut off Hunk’s well-intentioned interrogation Lance swore that he would do something nice for him when they got back to the castle. “You should be in position now!” the Altean said. A wormhole, identical to the one they’d travelled through earlier, appeared in front of Blue. “Remember that the Princess can only hold the wormholes open for two vargas, so do try and hurry back! According to our readings, both planets are relatively peaceful, so if you do get stuck it should be a relaxing place to live out the rest of your lives!”

Lance’s eyes widened in alarm. “What?”

Hunk spluttered, “Wait, you didn’t - what even  _ is  _ a varga?!”

Blue, the traitor, hadn’t slowed down at Coran’s explanation, so the last thing they heard before slipping into the wormhole was a far too cheery, “Enjoy your trip!”

Lance let out an incoherent yell fueled by a hot mixture of shock and rage as Blue exited the warped spacetime just outside of yet another planet’s orbit. Hunk looked up from the scanner thingy Allura had given him, huffed loudly, then said, “According to this, the Yellow Lion should be somewhere on the northwestern quadrant of the planet. But seriously, man, how are you? You almost hit Allura when she went for your ear, and you keep - I don’t know, spacing out.”

Thankfully, Blue chose that moment to throw up some sort of circular indicator on the display. It - ugh, screw it,  _ she _ \- passed along a glimpse of the Yellow Lion as it had been before Voltron separated. Lance’s mouth tightened into a thin line as he focused on the display and guiding Blue towards what was presumably the Yellow Lion’s location. “She just surprised me. I mean, come on, a beautiful woman falls into my arms, starts asking crazy questions, and I’m not allowed to be a bit freaked out when she tries to grab me?”

She’d succeeded, actually. Lance had managed to duck away when she first tried to snatch his ear, but then her other hand had snapped out and grabbed a fistful of his hair. Allura was  _ fast  _ and obviously a trained fighter.  If Lance had needed a little time to breathe after she let him go, to remind himself that no one in that room was going to try and kill him when he lost his footing. Well... 

No one else had to know that. 

Hunk let out a groan, rough with frustration. “That’s not what I - Jesus, Lance. I haven’t seen you in a year, you come back with scars and-- and whatever is going on with your hair, and you’re not talking--”

“I’m talking! We’re talking right now!” Lance protested, finally looking over at his friend.

“But you’re not  _ saying  _ anything!” Hunk threw his hands up in the air. 

“There are words coming out of my mouth! That’s literally the definition of saying something!” What else was he supposed to do? Break down and cry? Curl into a ball until he could think about fighting the Galra without panicking? What good would  _ that  _ do?

“Maybe technically, but you’re not-- crap, look out!” Hunk cried, pointing forward.

Lance whipped his head back to Blue’s displays just in time to veer out of the way of three fighters flying straight at them. Galra. “I thought this planet was supposed to be peaceful?!” he shrieked. 

The trio of fighters zoomed past them and out of sight. Hunk’s eyes darted around the cockpit as he clutched at the back of Lance’s chair. “I guess the castle’s sensors are a little bit off after ten thousand years!” 

Blue’s quintessence shifted from the neutral flow of space flight to a taut, battle-ready wariness as she passed along an impression of diving down towards the planet at full speed. Blue was certain they could handle it. The Galra ships? Not so much, if her image of the Galra fighters crashing and burning under the heat of a fast entry into the planet’s atmosphere was anything to go by. 

“Hold on!” Lance shouted as he urged Blue into a sharp dive. 

“Wait, wait - no, no, no, don't you dare--!” Hunk stumbled before he managed to stabilize himself, one hand on Lance’s chair and the other pressed flat against the side display. 

It only took moments for Blue enter the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere. As they continued, the indistinct brown of the planet’s surface began morphing into visible mountain ranges and valleys. However, Blue’s urgency never faded, never changed into a rush of victory signaling the destruction of the Galra fighters. The lion’s confidence faltered, and instantly Lance knew that the ships pursuing them had not buckled under the heat of reentry like the ships she’d faced thousands of years before. 

It had been stupid to hope that the Galra hadn’t improved their technology over ten thousand years of conquering. Of course it couldn’t be that easy. Lance pulled Blue out of the dive, both lion and pilot straining against the forces of gravity and their own momentum.

“I think ‘m gonna be sick…” Hunk mumbled.

Lance clenched his jaw and readjusted Blue’s course so that they were once again headed toward the Yellow Lion’s location. If the Galra were already here, they couldn't afford to waste any more time. A single lion had done an impressive amount of damage to a Galra battlecruiser; he didn't want to imagine what Zarkon could do with even one under his control, never mind all five. 

Unfortunately, the fighters weren't deterred by Blue’s abrupt shift in direction. Alarm flared in her quintessence as some sort of blinking alert popped up on Lance’s right with a shrill beep. But while Lance had picked up a couple of things from Standardized Galerian, he had absolutely no clue what the tiny writing beneath the larger symbol meant. An image flickered through Lance’s mind too fast for him to understand it, and Blue let out a growl before throwing herself into a backwards loop without any warning or input from Lance. His heart leapt into his throat as the world spun, some kind of missile flying through the sky where they had been only a moment before. It took longer than it should have for him to realize that Blue was trying to get into position to fire at the fighters. 

Lance began charging the canon a second too late; when Blue fired, only one of the fighters was caught in the blast. The other two strafed to the side and avoided being damaged at all. Shit. Shit, shit, now what--

Blue urged him onward. She refused to be scared off by a handful of fighters. Combined with Lance’s terror at the idea of what would happen if the Galra got their claws on Yellow or Blue, it was enough for them to fall back into sync. Lance pushed the joysticks forward slightly and Blue put on a burst of speed as they rocketed toward the Yellow Lion’s location. 

Only seconds later, the same alert popped up. This time Lance caught the subtle pressure of Blue’s quintessence against his thoughts, trying to alert him to the encroaching missiles without distracting him with something as heavy-handed as a technicolor pictures she’d used up until now. Lance twisted Blue into a barrel roll, avoiding one, two, three missiles---

They didn't dodge the fourth, however, and Lance could feel its impact against Blue’s leg. It wasn't pain, not exactly, but he could feel the quintessence-powered engine sputter and fail just long enough for Blue to lose her momentum. Hunk shrieked as they plummeted towards the ground. Lance tried to force his breathing to remain steady even as his hands shook on the controls, with only a moderate level of success. 

Blue recovered quickly and Lance shifted their trajectory just enough that they careened past a plateau instead of crashing into it. Something started beeping again. This time, Blue shoved an image at him before he could start to wonder - some kind of plasma weapon. Lance worked in tandem with Blue’s quintessence and regained control of her engines just in time to avoid the blasts and a messy collision with the ground. Blue shot forward while Lance glanced at Hunk and asked, “How close are we?!”

Hunk looked down at the scanner in his hand and said, “Uh, not too far, looks like it should be underneath us, right over...there. Great.” He pointed toward some kind of quarry, marked by a couple of ships and some machinery that were obviously Galra in design. Their color scheme wasn’t exactly subtle. 

Of course the Yellow Lion would be beneath a Galra outpost. He  _ knew  _ getting to Blue had been too easy. There was no way the Galra had come this close to the Yellow Lion by mistake; they had to know it was here. Which meant they couldn’t afford to waste any more time, no matter how risky it was. Lance leaned forward slightly in his seat and said, “Right, hang on, we’re going in!” 

“Woah, what, shouldn’t we talk about this?!” Hunk shouted, stumbling forward slightly as Blue boosted her speed. 

Lance approached the quarry in a zigzagging pattern, avoiding the shots of the few dozen sentries who scurried out into the open at Blue’s approach. “We don’t exactly have a lot of time!” 

“Yeah, but you’re not just going to drop me down there, right?”

Well. Actually.

“...Right?! Lance!”

The cockpit shook as Blue landed on the rocky ground. Through her quintessence, he felt a sentry crumple like paper under one of her massive metal paws. “Look, don’t worry about it, I’ll cover you!” 

While Blue crossed the distance between them and the entrance to the Galra excavation in large bounds, Hunk began to ramble, “But - but - what if the Yellow Lion doesn’t work? What if I throw up and it rejects me? What if I start panicking - wait, is this panicking, am I already panicking--?” 

“Calm down, buddy. Just think of it like another test at the Garrison - you always aced those!” Hunk had been horribly nervous the night before any sort of test or presentation despite the fact that the worst grade he’d ever gotten in a class was a B. Maybe it made him a bad person, but Lance found it kind of comforting that it hadn’t changed. Now, how the hell was he going to get Hunk out of Blue in the middle of a firefight…?

Blue rumbled with amusement, tugging at a half-remembered frame from a cartoon Lance had seen once - the floor dropping out from underneath an animated cat, who plummeted with an outraged meow. She slowed her pace slightly, her head dipping towards the ground as she communicated her idea to Lance. When the eject button popped up in front of him, it was actually in a shape that he could recognize. He tapped it, and the sound of rushing air filled the cockpit as the floor beneath Hunk vanished. The other boy let out a yell that faded into the distance as he dropped. Lance waited just long enough to watch Hunk roll towards the tunnel before turning Blue to shield him from the sentries’ gunfire. 

It shouldn’t take Hunk too long to find and bond with the Yellow Lion; all Lance had to do was distract the Galra until then. And drawing attention? Putting on a show? He’d had a lot of practice doing that with significantly less protection than an ancient alien warship. A reckless grin unfurled across his face. “All right, girl. Time to make some noise.”

Lance asked Blue to charge her cannon. She obliged, and the blue beam cut through the middle of the quarry, annihilating the few sentries that stood in its way and gouging a deep line into the rock. They powered up the canon once more, but Lance grimaced when he saw the sentries begin to scatter. Apparently they were smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage Blue could do. What he really needed was a way to pick off individual sentries quickly...

As Blue fired the cannon again, she pressed another image against his mind - using her tail as a laser gun? What? Aliens were _so_ weird. 

Whatever. As long as it worked. Lance glanced at the closest sentry and felt Blue’s focus follow his. Together, they fired her tail gun at it. The robot was shorn in half under the force of the blast and collapsed to the ground lifelessly. A couple more shots hit Blue’s armor, but they were so weak in comparison to her defenses that she barely even felt them. Sentries alone posed no threat. They advanced, thinning out the crowd of enemies with Blue’s canon and tail gun until there were only a few left. 

Then something popped up on Blue’s display, flashing red. The same icon she’d used earlier to alert him to the Galra fighters.  _ Shit.  _ Lance glanced up at the sky and clenched his jaw when he saw four fighters approaching. They must have already started sending in reinforcements. Not good. Really not good. Those things could do some actual damage, and staying on the ground would only make him an easier target. 

He couldn’t tell whether he moved the controls or Blue ignited her engines first (which was probably the point of that ‘mystical bond’ thing Allura talked about), but either way they shot up into the air. The tail gun was easier to aim and faster to fire, so Lance used that instead of charging up Blue’s cannon as they flew towards the fighters. He couldn’t risk moving too far from the excavation site in case more reinforcements were on their way, but hopefully he could keep the fighters’ heavier artillery from damaging whatever was going on underground. Hunk was still down there, and if he wasn’t in his lion yet, even a single missile could - Lance grimaced at the thought.

His last shot skimmed over the wing of a fighter, causing enough damage to produce sparks and smoke. Not enough to knock it out of the air, unfortunately. Lance pulled Blue into a sharp turn as they swept past the fighters, firing off a couple of poorly-aimed blasts with her tail gun to dissuade them from attacking. As the Galra ships began their second approach, Lance charged Blue’s cannon and fired. One of the fighters reacted too slowly and was annihilated entirely by the beam, while another was clipped on the hull and spiraled out of control towards the ground. 

For a brief moment, Lance grinned - though it was more a bearing of teeth than an expression of happiness. His first introduction to alien life was the crack of a Galra soldier’s gun against the back of his skull, the apathy of the auction block, Ozar’s casual treatment of people as objects he owned, Lona’s cruel and careless smirk. Opportunities to resist had been rare; even when he battled Galra in the arena, it was for the amusement of those who sat in the stands. This? Fighting back, not as a slave, but as a free man? Exhilarating. 

Blue demanded his attention with a sharp tug of her quintessence. There was something behind them. They shot away at an angle that would hopefully give Lance a view of both the fighters he’d engaged earlier and the newcomers and froze when he saw that the reinforcements weren’t heading towards him. They were going straight for the excavation site instead. 

No.  _ Hell  _ no. 

Lance was not going to lose Hunk just after finding him again. Not like this. Not after dragging him into a war he should’ve spent his life knowing nothing about. He slammed the controls forward and Blue raced after the fighters. Lance shot one down with the tail gun, but before he could move on to the other two, they fired their missiles. Directly at the tunnel. 

_ “Hunk!”  _ Lance screamed, the name tearing from his throat as he tried to make Blue go faster. Her quintessence rushed around him, a storm of cold, calm fury against his own terror.  Nothing stopped Blue, but Lance was only human, and if Hunk was really---

He could barely comprehend it. 

Escaping, returning to Earth had been a dream come true. Waking up to Hunk? The metaphorical cherry on top of the imaginary sundae. A blessing he hadn’t earned. Good things always came at a price and Lance had intended to pay his by warning Earth about the Galra, but that definitely hadn’t worked out as planned. Instead, he’d dragged Hunk, Pidge, Keith, and Shiro into a conflict they were completely unprepared for. If any of them died out here - if those missiles had killed Hunk - that was on him. 

Lance wanted to protect people, not get them killed. Maybe that was stupid. Maybe he should know better by now. Maybe he should’ve entered Blue alone, left the others behind on Earth, where they would have been  _ safe. _

Blue roared, demanding his attention. Something was coming---

Whatever it was, it slammed into Blue’s back with enough force to knock her to the ground. Shit. He'd totally forgotten about the other fighters. Stupid, stupid,  _ stupid.  _ Losing track of your enemies got you killed. That was how they'd managed to fire off those missiles at the tunnel in the first place, and he'd gone and done it again. 

Blue hit the planet’s surface at an angle, the impact spreading out over what would've been her right hip and rib cage if she were made of flesh and bone instead of metal. Lance’s skull cracked against his seat as he struggled to get Blue on her feet. She tried to work with him, but the fall combined with the fighters’ firepower had done enough damage that she struggled. The interior of the cockpit flashed red, a visual cue that matched Blue’s urgency. She wouldn’t be able to launch into the air fast enough to avoid the fighters - they were already coming in for another sweep. 

This was going to hurt, if it didn’t kill him outright. But that was a situation he was familiar with and it wasn’t going to stop him this time either. Lance coaxed Blue into charging her canon as the fighters approached. He fired and took one down, but that still left three others. He couldn’t help but flinch back as they shot their missiles at him. Blue growled in the back of his mind. Lance got the sense that if she’d had a couple more seconds, they could be airborne. He had no idea how that was possible though. A busted engine was a busted engine and -  _ holy shit.  _

His froze as a hulking shape of yellow and white exploded from the ground in front of him, shielding him from the missiles. Joy filled Lance’s chest with giddiness; it was Hunk - it had to be! He’d survived and bonded with Yellow. Blue’s quintessence surged with an almost childish excitement as the other lion leaped and performed a belly flop, crushing the fighters beneath their bulk. 

“Yes!” Lance cheered, a strained giggle slipping out.

Hunk’s face appeared on the display. “You okay there?” he asked, a grin tugging at his mouth. 

A smile began to grow on Lance’s face, mirroring his friend’s. “Buddy! You made it! I - for a moment, I thought - but you got to Yellow! And saved me!” 

“Yeah! This guy has enough armor to take quite a beating--” Hunk began, only to be cut off by another group of reinforcements heading towards their position. Now would be a really great time for Blue to finish fixing herself, or whatever she was doing. 

Blue let out a huff as the interior of the cockpit finally stopped flashing red. Uh. Well then. “I think it’s time for us to go!” Lance shouted, activating Blue’s engines and preparing to take off. They couldn’t take on a whole planet of Galra by themselves, no matter how tempting it was to stay behind and wreck everything they’d installed on this planet. 

Hunk followed him as Blue rocketed into the sky. “Right!”

Allura popped up on Blue’s display just as Hunk vanished. “Paladins, please hurry. I cannot keep the portal open for much longer,” she said before disappearing. Something flared bright white in the sky like a second sun before fading slightly. Blue marked it on her display. That had to be the wormhole. Lance adjusted his course so he was headed straight towards it and increased Blue’s speed. 

There was no reason to worry  - surely Blue would warn him if something happened - but that wasn’t very comforting when he couldn't see Hunk or Yellow. What if something went wrong and Hunk got left behind? Was he really all right, or had he been injured?

His racing thoughts drew Blue’s attention. She began to purr as they shot up through the planet’s atmosphere, but her reassurance did little to settle the anxiety trembling beneath his ribcage. The lions had connected them automatically when they’d talked earlier, so... Lance licked his lips and called out, “Hunk?”

His friend’s face popped up immediately, concern written clearly in the way his brow wrinkled and his warm eyes focused on Lance. “Yeah, buddy?”

“I just - uh - are you okay? I mean, it kinda looked like the cave collapsed on you, and I—” Lance stopped. Swallowed. “...I was worried,” he finished in a small voice. 

Hunk’s expression relaxed slightly. “I’m fine, man. I mean, other than the hundreds of Galra that want us dead, but I guess that’s kind of old news for you - uh, crap!” He twisted to glance at something just as Blue’s quintessence urgently jabbed at Lance. Their pursuers were now close enough to fire. 

Lance directed Blue into a tight upwards spiral, shifting out of the path of the plasma bolts. Hunk, on the other hand, didn’t manage to dodge as smoothly if his yelling was anything to go by. Blue kept his video feed up on her display as they broke through the edge of the planet’s atmosphere and slipped through Allura’s wormhole. 

Hunk let out a long groan as they popped out of the portal. “You doing all right over there?” Lance called.

Hunk got up out of his seat, holding up one finger before stumbling off of the screen. Lance winced at the faint retching noises that carried over whatever microphones the lions used to pick up their voices. On the bright side, if motion sickness was their biggest problem, they’d gotten off pretty lightly for two kids who had just stolen something the Galra were after. 

“Okay...okay, I’m good.” Hunk said a moment later, then returned to his chair.

Lance let out a long sigh. It was fine. They’d both made it out. As long as Pidge and Shiro were okay, everything had gone well. How likely was it that no one had been hurt, though? Surely the chances of getting three of the five lions without any casualties were astronomically low. After all, the Galra had centuries of practice at warfare and out of the five of them he was the only one who had even  _ met  _ one of the Galra before. It was too early to relax.

“Lance, you coming?”

Blinking, Lance looked up to see Yellow was now in front of them, already heading down towards the planet. Blue’s quintessence wrapped around him like a warm blanket as she marked the castle’s location on the planet below on her display. Right. This wasn’t the time to let an internal freakout slow him down. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming!” he said, and piloted Blue forward. 

As they descended, Blue kept Hunk’s video feed up on the screen despite the fact that he was far too busy figuring out how to pilot Yellow to talk to Lance. It  _ did  _ make him feel better, but it was kind of embarrassing that he needed to be able to look over at Hunk’s face, hunched over his lion’s controls, to remind himself that they were both fine. 

Blue huffed at him. Lance didn’t bother to fight down the tiny smile tugging at his lips. “I love you too, girl,” he said fondly, patting one of the joysticks. 

The Altean castle grew from a faint speck on top of a cliff to its full-sized glory as Blue and Yellow approached. Lance felt some of the tension he’d been carrying in his shoulders drain away as he spotted the Green Lion standing just in front of the castle, completely unharmed. Shiro and Pidge might be okay then. 

Hunk and Lance set their lions down next to Green. Lance stood up, allowed himself one last glance at the video feed to Yellow’s cockpit, and then made his way out of Blue. She lowered her head so he could easily jump down from her open jaw. As the rubber soles of his bodysuit impacted the ground, Lance glanced over at Yellow to see Hunk standing just in front of his lion, letting out a loud groan as he stretched his arms up above his head. 

Lance jogged over to him. “Feeling a bit banged up?” he asked, his tone falling awkwardly between concerned and teasing. 

“I’m pretty sure my bruises have bruises from when you dropped me on that planet,” Hunk grumbled. 

Oh. Right. That...made sense. Lance cringed. “Uh, sorry?”

Hunk waved him off. “Let’s just skip that next time, huh? C’mon, we shouldn’t keep the others waiting.”

Lance nodded, and the two of them entered the castle at a pace that wasn’t  _ quite  _ running, but probably would’ve had the instructors back at the Garrison frowning at them anyway. They entered the castle and sped through the halls without taking too many wrong turns. A couple of times, Lance felt like he should break the silence but the words snagged on the things he couldn’t say and tangled in his throat, so he kept silent. Hunk seemed too wrapped up in his own thoughts to mind all that much. 

The door to the bridge slid open, revealing Allura standing in the center of the room with Coran at her side and Keith, Pidge, and Shiro arranged around her. 

“Oh good, you made it,” Allura smiled as they stepped inside. 

“Uh, barely,” Lance said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “You guys have a pretty weird definition of peaceful, I gotta say. Either that or your sensors are way off.”

“Yeah, do you guys need to recalibrate them or something? Because like, if that’s a planet that reads as peaceful I really don’t want to know what one that reads as violent is like,” said Hunk. 

Pidge leaned around Shiro’s bulk to smirk up at Lance. “What, were you not up to the challenge, Mr. Ace Pilot?” 

“Rude!” Lance cried, laying a hand over his heart and gasping dramatically. 

Shiro let out a sound that could’ve been either a sigh or a very quiet chuckle. Lance was going to choose to interpret it as a chuckle because he was hilarious. “Did you find the Red Lion yet?” the older man asked, looking to Allura. 

Keith was the one who answered, however. He looked over at them, his arms still crossed, and said, “Sort of.”

Lance frowned. “Sort of? What the heck does that mean?”

Coran stepped forward, tugging on his mustache for a moment as he said, “Well, it’s nearby! Unfortunately, it’s nearby because it’s in the Galra cruiser that just began orbiting Arus - which is this very planet.”

“Wait, the Galra are here?” Lance demanded. Hadn’t Coran said they’d have more time? 

“Er...yes. My calculations were a bit off. I guess the Galra have improved their space travel technology over the decaphoebs,” Coran grimaced slightly.

The sound of static filled the room for a few seconds as the front display began to flicker. Lance stiffened. Had the Galra found a way to hack into the castle or something? Because that would be  _ really  _ bad. 

However, the only thing that appeared on the screen was a video feed centered on a rather fierce-looking Galra with some kind of ocular prosthetic and the red and orange armor of a commander. 

The Galra wasted no time in laying out his terms. “Princess Allura, I am Commander Sendak of the Galra Empire. I have come here on behalf of Emperor Zarkon, Lord of the Known Universe, to confiscate the Lions of Voltron and accept your unconditional surrender. Any act of resistance will be treated as a declaration of war, and we will respond by destroying your entire planet. I hope you act wisely.” 

The feed shut off as soon as he finished speaking, leaving shocked silence in his wake. 

“Oh man, what are we going to do?” Hunk groaned.

“First of all, let’s not panic,” Shiro said firmly. 

Hunk wasn’t entirely on board with that plan, apparently. “The evil purple space cat is driving his alien warship towards us, and your advice is to  _ not panic?  _ We only have four lions--”

“Technically only three,” Pidge corrected.

Hunk patted her on the shoulder before he began to pace, glancing around at the others in the room. “Yes! Thank you!  _ Three  _ lions, a castle that’s like ten thousand years old, two space elves that were popsicles until an hour ago, three cadets that have never left Earth until today, my best friend who has been a prisoner for a year, one adult human! I mean, Shiro, I respect the hell out of you, I think you’re really brave and your piloting on the Europa mission was insane, but from what I can see, now is the perfect time to panic!”

Allura’s expression slowly shifted from shock to something steelier as Hunk continued to speak. She said, “We’re not completely defenseless. This castle has a particle barrier we can activate.”

That was something, but a shield couldn’t protect them forever. Coran turned to face the front display and made a gesture that pulled up a hologram of the Galra cruiser in front of him, the cannon mounted on it marked in red. “According to our scans, their weaponry has enough firepower to decimate our defenses in only a couple of hits,” he said before looking back at the others.

“None of this is giving me a reason not to panic,” Hunk protested. 

“Look, we just need to figure out our plan of action. Quickly,” Shiro said. 

The hologram Coran had generated looked different from the cruisers Lance had seen and the one he’d taken down in Blue. The massive cannon was an obvious difference, but there were three linear structures attached to each side that he didn’t recognize and there was no telling what they were for. Maybe if they were lucky it was just some sort of fuel for the cannon, but Lance wasn’t willing to bet on that. 

“Can’t we just escape through one of Allura’s wormholes?” he suggested. They couldn’t give the lions to the Galra, but it was better to escape and survive than initiate a battle they weren't prepared for.

“I second that. Yes. I like that plan,” Hunk said immediately.

Pidge took a step forward, angling herself so that Lance could clearly see her eyebrows drawing low over her eyes. “We can’t just abandon Arus,” she objected.

“Why not?” Lance demanded, throwing his hands up into the air. “I mean, it’s not ideal because the Galra will probably blow up the planet, but it’s not like there’s sentient life here besides us--”

“There is, actually,” Allura interrupted, her mouth pressed into a grim line. “The local Arusians were only just beginning to develop their own language when Alteans first found this planet, but I sent out a couple probes while you were gone and it appears that they’ve developed permanent settlements since then.”

Oh. Shit. Lance shut his mouth. That was...bad. 

“But maybe if we leave this Sendak dude will follow us like the other Galra did when we left Earth!” Hunk said. 

Keith finally decided to contribute to the conversation and took a couple steps towards the rest of the group. “No way. There’s nothing stopping him from destroying this planet and then following us. We’ve got to stay and fight.” 

Part of Lance wanted to agree with him, but that was the stupid part. The part he’d tried to kill in the arena. Besides, he wasn’t going to break the bro code and side with  _ Keith  _ over  _ Hunk.  _ He stalked towards Keith as he said, “Oh yeah? What good’ll that do if we just end up getting killed? There’s got to be a way to draw them off!” he said. 

Keith frowned. “We can’t just keep running! I say we stay.”

“Leaving!” Lance retorted.

“Staying!” Pidge chimed in. 

Shiro moved in between the younger humans, pushing them apart. Lance reluctantly backed up, but continued glaring at Keith, who scowled right back. Shiro said, “All right, that’s enough! Princess, these are your lions. This is your castle. What do you think we should do?”

She probably was the most qualified out of all of them to make this kind of decision. If she was some sort of princess, that meant she had to have training in politics and military strategy, right?

“I...I don’t know,” Allura admitted, looking down. 

“Perhaps your father can help,” Coran suggested, looking over at the princess.

“My - father?” Allura blinked.

Pidge tilted her head to the side. “Wait, isn’t he dead?”

Coran said, “Well, yes, but his memories have been stored and hosted in the Castle. Princess...this way. I’ll show you.” He put a hand on her shoulder and guided her out of the room. The humans shuffled out of their way and remained quiet until the door shut behind the Alteans, though whether it was out of respect for Allura’s grief or their shock, Lance had no idea. 

“Alteans can store the memories of dead people as  _ artificial intelligences?”  _ Pidge said, sounding completely awed. 

Lance shrugged. “Alien tech can do all kinds of crazy shit. You get used to it.” Maybe ‘numbed’ was the better term, at least in his case. There were only so many times he could see a Druid’s work through a video or intertwined with the body of an opponent before it lost its shock value. 

Pidge continued, “I wonder if it’s capable of true independent thought? I mean, if it’s just memories that would be less impressive. Do you think the technology they used to turn the memories into data is related to whatever mental bond we have with our lions?” She looked over at Hunk, clearly expecting his input. 

Hunk blinked, then said, “Uh, maybe? It was the Alteans who built the lions in the first place, right? So I guess it would make sense.” 

“Okay, but would something that could read Altean minds read ours? Our internal biology could be completely different, so--” she paused, frowning at something. “Actually, wait, how can we understand each other? There’s absolutely no way Altean linguistic development was so similar to humans’ that they can speak modern English perfectly.”

Lance took a brief moment to bask in knowing something that Hunk and Pidge didn’t. He’d probably never experience it again. He explained, “There’s universal translator technology. It’s supposed to convert your native language to some sort of...universal code? Which is then converted to the native language of the listener or something. I never learned the details. The Galra inserted me with some sort of chip when I was first captured, but I don’t know how it worked for the rest of you. Maybe it was the lions?” The implications of the lions being able to do that sort of thing were kind of creepy, though.

Pidge’s eyes practically lit up. “Really? So you can talk to  _ anyone  _ like this? That’s awesome!”

Lance rubbed at his wrist where his chip had been injected. The only reason the Galra bothered with them were to ensure their prisoners understood what their captors were saying. If the Alteans had them too, maybe the technology had originally been developed for more peaceful purposes, but Lance had a hard time divorcing his translator from the Galra soldier that had begun barking orders at him as soon as it had been implanted.

Hunk, drawn in by Pidge’s enthusiasm, said, “Do you think it’s some kind of computer code or like, an actual language?” 

With that, Pidge was off, speaking animatedly about something related to coding that flew entirely over Lance’s head. As she and Hunk began to babble at each other, Shiro laid a hand on Keith’s shoulder and pulled him off to the side of the room where the two of them began to whisper quietly to each other. Eavesdropping was  _ really  _ tempting, but Lance forced himself to take a few steps back and squash the urge.

Every time he looked at Keith and his  _ stupid  _ hair and his  _ stupid  _ face, the pieces of Lance-the-Cadet that remained in Lance-the-Survivor refused to let go of the dozens of times the other boy had shown him up. Keith hadn’t cared when it was announced that Lance had been chosen for the Kerberos internship, so even that hadn’t given him much satisfaction. They were countless light years away from Earth, caught in the middle of a war that had been raging for millennia. It shouldn’t matter that Keith was obviously close to Shiro, who Lance had always admired, and  _ still  _ didn’t think Lance was worth more than a cursory glance. Yet  somehow it did. 

It wasn’t long before the door slid open again. Allura strode into the room, Coran just behind her. She’d changed her outfit - some kind of combat suit, maybe? - and tied her hair back into a bun. The humans looked up as she walked in, back straight and chin lifted proudly. She said, “The five of you found the Blue Lion for a reason. Voltron must be formed again and we must fight and keep fighting until Zarkon’s empire is gone. Voltron and her paladins are the universe’s only hope.  _ We  _ are the universe’s only hope.”

Lance had been kind of afraid she would say something like that from the moment she’d begun explaining the whole ‘the lion chooses the paladin’ thing after waking up. He really didn’t like the idea of being the last line of resistance against the Galra Empire; he knew intimately how good they were at crushing any kind of rebellion. But he couldn’t turn away either. That would be spitting on the fellow slaves that had helped him, on what Commander Leon had seen in him at the Garrison, on the compassion his parents had taught him.

If he ran away now, he hadn’t deserved to survive the arena. 

“We’re with you, Princess,” Shiro said.

Allura nodded once. “Good. Come this way. I’ll take you to the armory.” 

They were going to stay and fight, then. A grim silence settled over all seven of them as Allura stepped out of the bridge, the others trailing after her as she led them through the castle’s halls. It didn’t take long for Allura to find what she’d been looking for; she took a right and passed a couple doors before placing her palm on some sort of blue screen embedded into the third doorway. It slid open and Allura waved them inside. 

This room wasn’t quite as big as the bridge, but it was close. Five storage pods were arranged along the curve of the back wall, each containing a set of armor in marked with one of the colors of Voltron’s lions. 

Allura stepped into the room as the paladins gravitated towards their pods. The color coding made it pretty easy to tell which belonged to each of them. “These are your suits of armor. Normally you wouldn’t put them on top of civilian clothing, but they’re quite flexible and we are a little pressed for time,” she said as she did... _ something  _ that dissipated the pods’ barriers. Altean tech was even weirder than Galra stuff, and that was definitely saying something. 

“All right. Time to get suited up,” Shiro said as he reached for his armor. 

Lance glanced down at his jacket dubiously and shrugged it off. He loved it, but he kind of doubted it would be comfortable squished under the armor. The armor was surprisingly easy to pull on and the few buckles built into it were fairly intuitive. Whatever it was made out of, it adapted easily to Lance’s frame despite the fact that he could’ve sworn it was slightly too big when he first put it on. He clicked his belt shut and pulled on his helmet before turning back to face the others, who were also done dressing. 

Allura had moved over to some sort of shelf, and began speaking again as four objects began to float in front of her. Actually float. Jeez, what the hell? 

“These are your bayards, the traditional weapons of the paladins. It takes a distinct shape for each wielder,” she explained as one floated over to Lance, Keith, Pidge, and Hunk. “Unfortunately, the black bayard was lost along with her paladin, so we’ll have to find something else for you, Shiro.”

Hunk was the first to grab his bayard out of the air with his long reach, and with a flash of yellow it transformed into a massive canon, which was badass. Next, Keith’s became a sword (of course  _ he  _ got the traditional anime protagonist’s weapon). As Lance gripped his, it shifted into some kind of rifle. Okay, maybe that wasn’t as cool as a sword, but Lance had plenty of experience that had taught him that cool didn’t mean all that much when you were trying to survive. The added range of a gun was indispensable. 

When he looked over at Pidge, he saw that hers had become some sort of...he had no idea what that was, actually. It didn’t  _ look  _ very intimidating, but Lance knew her well enough to know that didn’t mean much.

Allura stepped towards the wall, unlocking some sort of panel that popped out to reveal a rack of weaponry holding everything from pistols two swords. It only held one or two of each weapon, but the variety was almost ridiculous. Lance was pretty sure that was an actual  _ bow  _ at the back. 

Shiro picked up a few of the guns, testing their fit in his hands, before finally settling on one of the smaller pistols. He shrugged at Allura’s raised eyebrow, saying, “It’s the only thing I ever learned how to shoot. The Garrison only teaches the basics.” 

Allura let out a quiet sigh. Lance suspected she was wondering why the galaxy had stuck her with these five humans for paladins. Frankly, he’d like to know the answer to that too. “We need to figure out a way to get Keith inside that cruiser so he can find the Red Lion. Paladins, are you ready?”

Lance couldn’t bring himself to do much more than force a grin and nod, but the others made up for his silence with their enthusiasm. Even Keith joined their vocal affirmative. Lance took a deep breath and reminded himself that he had two options when it came to the Galra Empire: fight or die - and he wasn’t ready to die just yet. 

And hell, even if they did end up killing him, he was going to make sure he hurt them in the process.

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, Lance had a hard time recalling their first proper battle with the Galra. He remembered acting as a decoy alongside Hunk, telling Pidge to keep an eye out for prisoners, and forming Voltron for the first time, but the details blurred together in an chaotic mess of adrenaline, terror, and plasma fire in blue and purple. He had only fragments of memory explaining how he’d ended up in the castle’s medical room, one of the prisoners Pidge had rescued in Green unconscious in his arms. 

Allura helped him shift the alien into the last open pod then tapped at something that initiated the freezing and healing process. “Just a few quintants and they should be healthy again,” she said, a faint smile crossing her face. 

Lance took a few steps back and nodded slowly. “Really? I mean - some of them have probably been enslaved for years. Maybe even decades.” Surely even Altean technology had its limits. 

“Physically, at least. Psychologically...there’s no way of knowing until they wake up,” Allura admitted. She didn’t turn to look at him directly, but her eyes slid sideways to watch him out of her peripheral. Lance got the feeling she wasn’t just talking about the aliens in the pods. He was suddenly,  _ excruciatingly, _ aware that they were alone. 

Allura was hardly going to launch an attack, but he couldn’t help the way his muscles tensed as she watched him. Coran had made all of them take off their armor earlier so he could whisk them off to be cleaned or something, and Lance felt naked with only his thin slave’s bodysuit protecting him from the rest of the universe. Leaving would make his discomfort too obvious, so he remained, the restless tapping of his foot against the floor the only change in his demeanor. 

Eventually, Allura glanced over at him. She opened her mouth, then hesitated. She paused for a moment before saying, “I wanted to ask if there is anything I can do - that is, I know things must have been difficult for you in captivity, so if there’s anything that would make your transition easier--” 

Her words crawled over something buried in his chest, raw and aching, that Lance preferred to keep shielded from view. He blurted out, “C’mon, Princess, if you want to spend more time with me, you could just ask.”

She let out a deep sigh as she turned to face him fully and crossed her arms over her chest. “Please try to be serious for a moment.”

He summoned a bright grin and replied, “But where’s the fun in that?”

“Lance...”

Of course she was going to be stubborn about it. The conclusion she’d come to when faced with the ragtag group of humans she had for paladins was  _ we can find a way.  _ That wasn’t the mind of someone who gave up easily. Lance might have admired it if that determination had been focused on anything else. 

“Look, I’m fine,” he began, scrambling for words that would protect him from her curiosity. “I mean - it sucked, but it wasn’t that bad. Really. The only thing I need is, uh - maybe a new set of clothes? This thing is kinda gross.” Lance used his fingers, tugging at the hem of his sleeve, as an excuse to look down and away from Allura. 

The princess relaxed slightly, her hands falling back to her sides. “The castle will be able to take care of that once we get everything up and running again. But--” she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Lance did his best not to flinch away from it. “--If you ever do want to talk about it, you can come to me. And...please keep in mind that your knowledge of the Galra is more recent than mine or Coran’s. You may know something valuable that we don’t.” 

Allura watched him for a second longer before dropping her hand and taking step back. Lance looked up, but he only met her gaze for a moment before glancing away again. He had nothing to say. Nothing useful, anyway. 

Lance could list off the tournaments he’d fought in, the opponents he’d survived (and killed), the scars carved into his skin, but none of that meant anything outside the arena. Better to ignore it. Better to forget it, as best he could. Except--

Allura exhaled softly. “I have to go check on the generator for the particle barrier,” she said as she began to walk towards the door. 

He watched her back, his tongue tangled in his throat, because there  _ was  _ something she should know. “Wait!” Lance cried, the word clawing out of his throat with an urgency that wouldn’t have been out of place on the battlefield. Allura stopped, looking back over her shoulder with wide eyes. 

“Um.” He cleared his throat. “There is - something. I didn’t escape on my own. I had help. Someone - she freed me. Helped me get to the escape pod. And she’s the one that told me about Voltron.”

Allura’s mouth fell open, but Lance continued stumbling through his story because if he didn’t get it out now, he never would. “There were, I don’t know, rumors. Stories that the slaves told each other. I didn’t really believe them, no one did, but - the gist of it is that there’s supposed to be this rebel group of Galra called the Blade of Marmora. Lona - the one who freed me - she told me she was a member of the Blade, then told me about Voltron and how to get to Earth.”

“A  _ Galra _ freed you? Are you certain?” Allura asked sceptically. 

“Yeah. I mean, I knew her. We’d - we met before. I don’t really know if she was telling the truth, but…” Lance trailed off. Even if she had, he wasn’t sure how much that was worth. If she was a member of the Blades, a supposed rebel group, and still done what she had—

That didn’t say anything good about the Blades of Marmora as a whole. 

“Well,” Allura said slowly. “I doubt we can trust these Blades, if they even exist, but I suppose it’s something to keep in mind.”

Lance shrugged and rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. Allura’s heavy gaze kept him pinned in place. He struggled to find something that would shift the weight of her focus somewhere else and said, “Hey, uh - is there any more of that food goo stuff you guys had around earlier? I’m starving.” 

It wasn’t totally a lie. He  _ was _ hungry. It just wasn’t his primary motivator. 

Allura blinked, then answered, “Ah, yes. I believe Coran was actually preparing some bowls for the five of you. I can show you the way before I head to the generator.

Lance let a lazy grin spread across his face. “Lead the way, Princess.”

She rolled her eyes, but proceeded towards the door, where she waited for him to catch up to her. Something tight in Lance’s chest relaxed. If he was lucky, this would be the first and last time he needed to talk about his time under the Galra. He wasn’t going to count on it, given his track record over the past year or so, but a guy could hope, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a massive thank you to tyrellis, IronRoseWriter, and everyone who's been kind enough to comment on my work and support it. I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. I can also be found on [tumblr](https://starry-lullaby.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to drop by.


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